


The Waste Land

by thisissarcasm



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-20
Updated: 2012-05-17
Packaged: 2017-10-29 20:15:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 40,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisissarcasm/pseuds/thisissarcasm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years after the death of Sherlock Holmes, John Watson finds himself saying goodbye all over again. Grieving and alone, he finds himself once again drawn onto the battlefields of London, and back into the life of a man he believed to be dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When Mary died, John Watson did not call for anyone immediately.

He had seen death in all of its forms. He had experienced the chaos of blood-soaked sands and severed limbs. He had seen patients drift off to sleep and never wake up from it, with the rhythmic rise and fall of their chests stopping as machines squealed a single, monotonous tone amidst sudden stillness. He had watched shocked looks on the faces of men taking in the shock of wounds that would kill them; and he had seen the look in the eyes of men who were certain they were about to die.

There was an eerie stillness in all of death’s forms, those moments after a human life ended when the world seemed dulled and silence fell, hushed, as though the very air felt its passing. It was a silence that an army doctor learned early on. For a time, he had grown used to it, as soldiers sometimes did. He had made peace with that part of himself ages ago.

He had been sleeping in a chair by her bedside – for how long, he could never tell – and was jarred from what rest he could find by the sound of a shift in her vital signs. When he opened his eyes, her breaths were already slowing, coming in shallower gasps, and John willed himself not to look away.

For months she had hung on; some days were better than others. It had been nearly eighteen months since the first doctor’s visit that told them both that something wasn’t quite right. A few weeks and several specialists later, the word ‘cancer’ had entered the picture. Mary had been determined to fight back, because that was her way: always determined to have the last word. John had loved that about her from the beginning.

Months had gone by and chemotherapy and surgery took their tolls. As Mary recovered, her prognosis improved. Just five months ago, the word ‘metastasized’ entered the picture, and Mary had calmly asked how much time she would have left. She didn’t let go of John’s hand the entire time, and took the information in with a resigned calm that surprised him. Inside, he had felt like screaming.

The last two months had been the worst, as Mary’s own body turned against her. Some days she was herself: joking with doctors, making fun of whatever as on television, encouraging Molly to sneak her things from the cafeteria that they wouldn’t feed her in a hospital. On the nights she was conscious and aware, even when she was too exhausted to speak, she would pat her bedside and John would join her.

And on the nights she couldn’t sleep, Mary would always ask John to tell her stories, and so he told her the only ones he knew that were worth telling, even though she had heard them a dozen times over. He told her of the dead lady in pink and the murderous cabbie. About smugglers and cipher codes. About Carl Powers, about The Woman, and about monstrous hounds roaming Dartmoor.

Those were the days that were less difficult. John had come to think of them as the kinder days, although there was nothing particularly kind about any of it. And yet compared to the days that she spent in delirium and in pain, they seemed like heaven. It began with simple things, like forgetting small details and blurred vision. By the end – by the night she died – there had been days when she could not even remember John’s name, and those were the times that she broke and allowed herself to cry.

John had seen plenty of people die. Many of them, right before the end, had one last good day. One last day where the pain was less and the fog lifted, if only a little. Today had been a good day. Mary had been alert but weak, her speech long since devastated by the tumors gradually breaking her mind down.

Today, Mary had watched the morning news with Molly, who had become a fixture of the room when she was on a break or between shifts. John was grateful for her presence. What had once seemed like shrill cheeriness and naiveté had proven to be a serene sort of understanding about the world that Mary and John both appreciated.

At lunchtime, Mary had patted her bedside, and John had joined her. Normally she would drift off to sleep again around midday, but today, she had stayed awake. She had laid there with her head tucked against his chest, listening to the rhythm of his heart and the steady in-and-out motion of his breathing.

When night fell, Mary had scribbled a note in jagged, labored writing: “Study in Pink.”

And he had told her the whole tale over again. She had read the blog, had heard the bits in between, and probably knew it all by heart, but it was her favorite of his stories and he never quite put his finger on why. He had asked her once, ages ago, why it stuck with her so, and she had shrugged and smiled that smile that would disarm anyone in their right mind and said, “I just like to hear you tell it.”

And so, he had told her the story of how he met Sherlock Holmes after being injured in Afghanistan. How he had looked at a flat with a strange man who saw through everything and everyone and kept a skull on his mantle. He told her about meeting Mycroft Holmes for the first time. He told her about running through the streets of London after a cab and leaving his cane in a restaurant. He told her about the cabbie and his pills, about a single gunshot (she swore never to tell anyone and she had kept her word), and about a shock blanket and Chinese food at an ungodly hour of the morning.

By the end, her eyelids had been heavy, and she had fallen asleep in his arms, a small, satisfied smile on her face, and John had laid there holding her for a while before eventually transitioning back to his chair.

Now, hours later, Mary Watson was dead. John had watched her last breath come and go in a small, defeated puff, and it was over. He sat in his chair and felt that sick, cold feeling he knew all too well roll through him. Mary lay completely still, practically swallowed up by the hospital bed. Her eyes were closed and if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought she looked peaceful.

She had always been thin and pale, but disease and time in spent in the hospital had done much to distort both things about her. She did not look like the same woman he had met nearly three years ago in the middle of a pub brawl – she no longer seemed like the wiry, feisty woman who had broken a beer bottle and threatened a large pub patron who had already given John a black eye. Later, when she had given him frozen peas to nurse the wound, he had asked her if she was a cop or something.

Mary Morstan had quickly become the only primary school teacher John Watson knew who would throw herself into the middle of a pub brawl to defend a stranger. They would laugh about it later on a real first date, when she rather candidly explained that her father had been a drunk and she knew how to break up a fight.

Now, she hardly seemed to be the same woman that he had fallen in love with somewhere along the way. It was difficult to imagine her in front of a classroom of five-year-olds now, but their art and brightly colored “get well soon” cards still hung around the room. She had insisted upon it. As many as they made, she would hang in the room, because that was the woman she was. She had been unable to work for months but sometimes, cards still came.

John sucked in a breath of air and rose from his seat, pausing to survey the room that had become his entire world over the past couple of months. Fresh flowers at the bedside, brought up by Molly that morning. Cards and drawings from children climbing the walls. A picture of John and Mary on their wedding day resting alongside the vase of flowers.

John moved to her bedside and picked up the framed photo, studying it. Mary’s smile was the first thing that always caught his attention, whether it was first meeting her or after a year of marriage. Her hair, normally blond and straight, was curled for the occasion. A joyless ex-husband caused her to laugh at the idea of a white dress but she had worn one anyway. John held onto the picture for a moment, and then sat it back in its place on the nightstand.

A piece of Mary’s hair was draped over her face, and he gently moved to brush it away. He let his fingertips linger on her cheek, and he felt that sick feeling overwhelming him. He had somehow convinced himself along the way that knowing what would happen would somehow make it easier: as he fought a sudden urge to vomit, he realized that he had been wrong.

He steeled himself as best he could and bent down, and it wasn’t until he planted a gentle kiss against Mary’s forehead that tears first threatened. There was at once a feeling as though all the air head been sucked out of the room, and John rose and wiped away a stray tear.

He left the room when the nurses and orderlies came for her. She had made her arrangements in advance. He had sat in the lobby for a great while, staring at Harry’s number in his phone but never dialing it because he wasn’t sure what to say. Every time he thought about the words – about actually having to say them – the world began to spin again.

It was a cool night, and the breeze from the rooftop of St. Bart’s made John feel as though he was able to breathe once again. He sat with his head in his hands along the rooftop wall, taking deep breaths and trying his best to remain focused. He had to call Harry. He had to contact the funeral home. So many things ran through his mind at once that it was almost unbearable, and John shook his head and continued to take deep breaths in hopes that somehow, just keeping himself breathing would make things clearer.

He stared out over the city, mostly asleep at three in the morning. Taxis would occasionally pass by on the streets below, but London was largely asleep. John took tentative steps forward to the edge of the roof. Part of him considered climbing up onto the ledge for a better view, and it occurred to him that in three years, he had never been up to the roof. Mike Stamford had gotten him a job teaching at Bart’s pretty easily, and sometimes, his coworkers would go up to the roof to smoke during their breaks. Some of them had invited John in the beginning, but the invitations stopped just as quickly as they had begun.

John stared down at the pavement and felt something angry stir in him, but only briefly. He clenched and then unclenched his left fist. He thought of his wife being carried out of her room on a gurney, no longer Mary Watson at all. It was strange, he thought, how quickly death changed a person into an object, no matter how hard the living fought it.

John felt dizziness mingle with the nauseous feeling churning in his gut, and he took a step backward from the edge. He hung his head, still breathing hard, and it was then, and only then, that his eyes came to rest on something he had not noticed before. His eyes went wide and he took a step back, and he clamped a hand over his mouth as he took in the words.

He read them over again to himself, and his eyes welled with tears all over again. Red spray paint that gleamed brightly even in the darkness of the roof at night spelled out a simple message, one that he had seen whispered about the internet, hastily spray painted onto the sides of buildings, hung up on flyers around London for three years.

I believe in Sherlock Holmes.

“John.” Molly’s voice drew him back from the shock of it all, and he turned to see her standing near the roof entrance. Her eyes were wide and already filled with tears, and she swallowed as though struggling to come up with something to say. The look on her face, which was drained completely of color, told him that she already knew about Mary.

John shook his head. “I needed some air.”

“Not up here,” Molly said, shaking her head. A stray tear fell. “I’m so sorry.”

“She’s gone, Molly,” John said.

Molly wiped a tear away. “I know.”

“I don’t want to be alone,” he said, his voice trembling as he spoke the words. Molly fell silent, clearly not sure of what she could possibly say to make this better.

John was not sure how he ended up sobbing into Molly’s shoulder. He had been fighting it since the moment he had left the hospital room, and now, he was unable to hold back any longer. He wept so hard that it hurt, his breath coming out in choked, painful sobs that he had been holding in for far too long. He had done his best to be strong for Mary. Now, there was no one left to be strong for at all.


	2. Chapter 2

John was eight years old the first time he attended any kind of funeral or visitation. It had been a great uncle he barely knew, and the thing that he remembered most was that his shoes had been a size too big because his mum insisted that they last him as long as possible. In a single-parent household with two kids, shoes didn’t come cheap.

 

His mother’s funeral followed in his twenties, and he had made the arrangements and spent most of it shaking hands, thanking people for condolences, and keeping an eye on a bleary-eyed and mostly drunk Harry. He always distinctly remembered Harry throwing up in the parking lot after the visitation, and then nearly oversleeping the next day and making them late for the funeral.

 

Mary’s visitation was different somehow. As a mostly clueless eight-year-old in shoes too big squirming in a pew, there was nothing expected of him but to do that very thing. With his mother, there had been the tales of what a great woman she had been, about how proud she would be of him, about past memories they’d shared.

 

With Mary, he was the grieving husband. The one that everyone needed to hug, to comfort, to somehow “fix.” There was no one who needed tending to, and no distractions or shock to take his mind off of it. It was a new and awkward experience, being the only one that mourners turned to with an extra ounce of pity in their gazes. John hated it.

 

Harry was almost three years sober and had, just before the visitation, tucked two small blue pills into the pocket of his jacket despite his protests.

 

When he had asked why, Harry had paused, and managed a small smile, muttering, “Trust me. You’re gonna need them.”

 

“I’ll be fine.”

 

Harry Watson had always been infuriating because she was, when alcohol didn’t enter the equation, an intelligent woman with a desire for attention. John had to admit that despite everything between them, Harry was doing her best to look after him, even if it was in her own way.

 

“I can tell from the look on your face that you’ll need them. If it makes you feel better, just keep them there to make me feel better, yeah?”

 

It had taken half an hour before John had quietly downed both pills while still shaking hands with countless parents, students, coworkers, friends of Mary’s. It had taken the fifth sad eyed child for John to do exactly what Harry knew he would, and he didn’t look at his sister the entire time. She was standing silently back as though acting as his bodyguard, and it was the last thing he had ever expected.

 

When the drugs began to take effect about twenty minutes later, John allowed his mind to wonder. Mary had refused the idea of any kind of viewing outright, insisting that the last thing she wanted was for her students – or anyone else – to remember her like that. John thought back to his uncle and to that strange feeling that came with seeing a dead body for the first time, to that quiet inability of a child’s mind to wrap its mind around the idea of a dead body. Mary Watson had refused to become that first dead body for any of her students, and it hit John in a rolling feeling of sickness and heat how dedicated and how thoughtful a woman she was.

 

She had met him as a broken, grieving man, and with her own unique blend of support and tough love, she had started putting him back together again, piece by piece. She never questioned him about what happened at Bart’s, instead waiting until he was ready to talk about it. It had taken about six months before he was ready to talk, and when he did, Mary had listened until he was finished.

 

He remembered a first kiss amidst an argument about a movie – he still believed that she had done it just to shut him up about faulty logistics in a science fiction film. He thought about how the tips of her ears would always turn red when she was either embarrassed (which wasn’t often) or when he would plant a kiss in just the right spot on the nape of her neck (which was a bit more often).

 

She could talk about one of her kids throwing up into the classroom hamster cage over dinner and laugh. She could likewise sit and listen to John’s horror stories from the hospital, from past crime scenes, utterly enthralled, and John loved that. When they had moved in together, it had been Mary who, after a moment’s consideration, took the skull from its corner of a box and sat it on the mantle in the study as though she was placing a family heirloom.

 

She had even managed to get along with Harry, which was an interesting development that he hadn’t expected. Both were strong women with few qualms about making their opinions known, and yet something had clicked in just such a way the first time the two had met one Christmas that had them both laughing and looking at embarrassing childhood photos well into the night. It had been the first Christmas John could recall that Harry had spent sober, and she hadn’t picked up a bottle since.

 

John remembered asking Mary once about how she was so damned patient. She took five-year-olds screaming in stride; she took John’s gloomier days with grace. She could even disarm the sometimes abrasive Harry. And on the rare occasions that her patience did run thin, she had a habit of violent swearing that would put most soldiers to shame, and she would be laughing again by the end of it.

 

Mrs. Hudson’s voice brought him back to reality. She looked older than he remembered – he hadn’t been by to see her in a few months, the last time being a few days before Mary’s condition worsened. He had made a point of keeping in touch with his former land lady even after leaving Baker Street because she had become, in her own way, a fixture in his life, a fixed point in time that he couldn’t and wouldn’t erase.

 

Tonight, the three years since he had moved seemed evident and his first thought was that she seemed thinner, and tired. She managed a small smile and wrapped him in a hug.

 

“If there’s anything I can do…”

 

It was all she said before saying hello to Harry and moving on. John tightened his left hand into a fist, and let it relax again. He sucked in a breath of air, and then let it out again. By the end of the next hour, there had been at least two hundred visitors – some John knew, and some he didn’t. He was certain that every primary school employee in London had turned out, and they were the most exhausting part. The unfamiliar faces telling him stories about his wife.

 

Lestrade had been in during the final hour, shaking his head and offering his condolences. He looked older too, and John wondered for a moment how old he looked these days. Molly had been one of the last to come. She and Mary had become friends along the way, and John couldn’t help but notice how sad Molly seemed as she surveyed the array of flowers strewn about the room, and how her eyes had filled with tears when she saw John. Molly said something about bringing food by, and John had nodded dumbly in response.

 

When the visitation was over, he sat alone on a pew in the chapel area of the funeral home where Mary’s funeral service was to be held the next morning. His eyes fell to the empty spot where her casket would rest. He had no idea how long he had been sitting there. He had asked Harry to give him a bit before leaving, and she had obliged. He imagined she was still waiting outside in the car for him.

 

For the first time all day, the world felt quiet. He was exhausted from the effort of it all, and sick of looks of pity. But more than anything, he supposed he was angry. At who or what, he didn’t know, but there it was. That old, long smoldering anger that ran deeper than he could articulate, that had served him so well in war time and again but proved otherwise useless.

 

“Hello, John.” He did not cast a glance sideways when Mycroft settled into the pew alongside him. For all of his efforts to keep in touch with Mrs. Hudson, John had avoided Mycroft Holmes at all costs. Mycroft had more or less kept his distance because there was some degree of silent acknowledgement between them that Mycroft had screwed up, and someone else had paid for his mistakes.

 

“I think I’d like to be alone just now, if you don’t mind,” John said, keeping it short but as polite as possible.

 

“I’m sorry for your loss.” Mycroft gave no indication that he intended on leaving, and John turned to look at him for the first time. Everyone around him looked older; Mycroft Holmes looked exactly the same as John had always remembered him.

 

“Thank you.”

 

The two men sat in silence for endless minutes. The chapel was eerily silent and dimly lit, and smelled faintly of flowers and carpet cleaner. John leaned back against the pew and stared at the stained glass depiction of the crucifixion at the front of the room, seemingly transfixed by the image.

 

“I know that you resent me. By all logic you probably despise me,” Mycroft said finally. “And I think perhaps I’ve earned that. Apologies are essentially just words, John, but I think it’s the least I owe you. Your wife was well-liked, it would seem.”

 

Mycroft had apologized to him before. Time and again, in fact, and it seemed to be one of the only things that truly bothered the elder Holmes brother. John continued to marvel at the man’s guilt, still eating away at him after three years, and took a small amount of comfort in it even though he knew it was wrong.

 

Mycroft cleared his throat. “I was away at university when our mother died. She’d been ill for some time and so it came as no surprise. It took me three hours to make it home. Do you know what I found when I arrived?”

 

“How could I?”

 

“Sherlock wouldn’t leave her side,” Mycroft said. “He’d never seen anyone die before. Of course, we’d been to funerals growing up, but it wasn’t the same. Not to him, I don’t suppose. I came home, and he was so angry with me for not being there. He said that she asked for me, and I think that he hated me from then on for not being there to answer. And can I tell you something, John? Something I’ve never told anyone?”

 

“I imagine you’re going to anyway,” John said with a defeated shrug.

 

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t regret it,” Mycroft told him, and his words echoed through the rafters of the chapel. “I left my dying mother and my younger brother behind at home out of blind ambition. And Sherlock never let me forget it, though he’d never have said it out loud. He didn’t speak for three days after she died.”

 

“Why are you telling me all this, exactly?” John snapped suddenly.

 

“I suppose because you’re a good man,” Mycroft told him. “With more courage than I can manage at times. You were there for your dying wife until the end. Much as you were there for my brother when I wasn’t. And that’s a burden no one should have to bear.”

 

“Well somebody bloody has to,” John said.

 

“And it’s always you, isn’t it? It always has to be you,” Mycroft said. “Life is exceptionally unkind that way.”

 

“Don’t you dare try to talk to me about life,” John said, hoping that whatever Harry had given him would hold and keep him from lashing out. “You hide behind lackeys and security cameras and mysterious phone calls. The rest of the world suffers while you sit on your ass. You don’t know the first thing about _life_.”

 

Mycroft nodded as though absorbing the words, and he rose. “Perhaps you’re right, John. But at least be grateful that you were there for those that mattered when they needed you the most. My condolences, Doctor Watson.”

 

And without another word, Mycroft was gone. John listened to his footsteps diminish over the carpeted chapel and then waited for the sound of a door closing beyond it, and he was grateful to be alone again.

 

The morning of Mary’s funeral dawned sunny and bright. John sat for a long while on the edge of the bed that occupied Harry’s spare bedroom. He couldn’t go back to the flat he had shared with Mary yet – everything there would inevitably bring him crashing back to reality again. There would be one of her jumpers thrown over the sofa as she would always do when she made it home from work. Pictures of the two of them, of Mary and her students, of Christmases and birthdays and everything in between, mounted on the walls. Books on the shelf that ranged from _Harry Potter_ novels to crime thrillers, with spines well worn.

 

It was more than he could take in at the moment, and so he had accepted Harry’s invitation to stay with her, much as he had when he had been unable to go back to Baker Street three years ago.

 

He did not speak through the entire service, opting instead to sit perfectly still next to Harry while a minister went on about leading a good life and enriching the lives of others. He talked about Mary’s students, her legacy, and all of the things a minister is paid to talk about at a funeral, and John didn’t listen to a word.

 

Instead, he thought back to meeting her, how she had so casually broken a beer bottle and pointed it at the rather large fellow promising John a punch to the jaw. John was fairly certain, and Mary had never discredited it, that the first words she had ever said to him were, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

 

The minister was leaving out all the important things. Mary’s laugh, which was infectious and often unstoppable and more than enough to brighten a sour mood. The way she hummed “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” under her breath when she washed her hands because she was so used to encouraging it in her students. How loud she got while watching football. The way she would ruffle his hair whenever she caught him sulking. All the times she had gotten teary over the same movie again and again, and then threatened him if he told anyone. The days she would send him almost comically pornographic text messages because she knew it would embarrass him. Her mind. Her wit. Her heart, her infinite patience, her understanding.

 

Something in John quivered and threatened tears, and he swallowed it all back down again and tried to focus on the minister instead.

 

When the graveside service concluded later in the morning and the crowd had gone, only John and Harry were left standing by the casket. She was to be buried in a plot adjacent to her parents, per her request: her mother had died when she was young, and her father when she was in her mid-twenties. John stood there staring at casket, at the flowers on top. As a doctor, he understood death on a physiological level. But as a human being, there was still something silently horrific about it, the knowledge that Mary – _his_ Mary – no longer occupied the body in the casket.

 

He lingered for a while at her grave, trying to somehow zero in on the thousands of things he wanted to say.

 

_I love you._

_I’m sorry._

_You deserved so much more than this._

_If it meant you still being here I would take your place._

He had decided a long time ago that the dead didn’t listen too keenly to the living, and so he resigned himself to saying nothing. 


	3. Chapter 3

John kept himself busy in the following months. Winter rolled over into early spring and brought plenty of rainy days, and John found that he didn’t mind them: it was the sunny days that seemed harsher. He buried himself in work as best he could. There were plenty of sick and injured people in London, and plenty of nervous medical students with questions when work was slow. He volunteered for shifts; covered for others who wanted a day off. If he had kept a count of it, it was likely that he had spent more time at Bart’s than he had at home, and he was fine with that. He went to lunches with Mike or Molly, depending on their schedules. He worked until he was so exhausted that going home meant little more than falling into bed for however long he could sleep before waking up and beginning the process again.

 

Tonight, he sat in his office, not bothering to look at the clock. The good thing about paperwork was that it kept him busy and kept him focused, and with half of the trouble of a sniveling toddler with a fever. He listened to the sound of rain against the window behind him. It was just past sundown, and he had scarcely realized it.

 

A text message alert from his phone brought him out of his paperwork-induced trance.

 

_Coffee? –Molly_

 

He found Molly Hooper in the morgue, writing up a report on some unfortunate sod that had, from what John could tell, had died of some kind of blunt force trauma. The dead man was mostly covered, but John could make out bruises at one of the temples. Molly finished up her bit of writing and then put the chart aside, and gave him a small smile. Two coffees sat on a nearby area a tasteful distance from the dead man.

 

“Blunt force trauma?” John asked, nodding to the man on the slab.

 

“Looks that way,” Molly told him. “Picked a fight in a pub and it got a bit out of hand.”

 

“I’d say so.”

 

It had been three months since Mary’s death, and three months since he had engaged in a meaningful conversation with anyone. Molly had that look on her face that she got when something was on her mind. John wanted nothing more than to avoid whatever conversation was about to happen, but he knew it was a long time coming.

 

“Listen, John…”

 

“I’m fine,” he interrupted, picking up one of the lidded coffee cups.

 

“You don’t know that’s what I was going to say.” Molly stared at him as though insulted, and then rolled her eyes. “Alright, so maybe it was.”

 

“Because you’ve got that ‘I’m uncomfortable but need to say something’ look on your face, and it’s all anyone ever seems to ask me anymore. If I’m fine. How I’m doing. How I’m holding up. Any way a person can think of to ask how I’m coping with losing my wife, I’ve heard it,” John told her.

 

There was no anger in his words, and none intended toward Molly. It was instead a sort of exasperation with the way people treated him now. He had even spotted a few of the medical residents upstairs looking at him like a wounded puppy dog a few weeks back – that had been infuriating, but he had ignored it as best he could.

 

Molly nodded. “I know. But I consider you a friend and I don’t think it counts the same if I’m asking. But I just…you seem very focused on work. You’ve saved lives in the past few months. Made a real difference here. And you look like it wouldn’t matter to you if any of those people lived or died.”

 

John considered what she was saying. His bedside manner with patients was what it always had been, at least as far as he could tell. He smiled and was as comforting as he could be. He was honest but delicate with the truth. He reassured old ladies. Delivered bad news to families. Watched squeamish first year medical students turn white in the presence of their first cadavers.

 

“I just thought maybe it would help if you talked to someone,” Molly told him when the silence got too uncomfortable between them. “I don’t mean me or anything like that, I’m not…have you thought about going back to therapy?”

 

John stared at her. “What good could that _possibly_ do? It doesn’t help. It never has.”

 

“My dad died when I was younger,” Molly told him. “It took a long time, and it was painful. Afterward, after he’d passed, my mum didn’t sit down for two days – she cooked, she cleaned, and she took care of all of us. I didn’t understand it for a long time. But I think she did it because it was her way of not acknowledging that he was gone. That if she stopped, and rested, then it would be real.”

 

“I promise you that’s not what I’m doing,” John said.

 

“I just need to know that you’re okay,” Molly told him, not looking him in the eye as she spoke.

 

John did the only thing he could think of: he gave the answer that Molly didn’t want, which was the same rehearsed answer he gave to everyone. “Some days are harder than others. But…I’m hanging in there.”

 

Molly frowned, and John wondered how convincing his answer had been. She silently lifted her own coffee to her lips, and shook her head. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

 

John sat down his coffee. “No, it’s…fine.”

 

“I’ve seen you like this before, you know,” Molly said. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but you did this very same thing before you met Mary.”

 

“Isn’t that what people do?” John asked. “Work and pay bills?”

 

“You know what I mean,” Molly said, finding a bit more strength to her voice. “You were different after Sherlock. Like if maybe you worked enough, or distracted yourself enough, then somehow you wouldn’t have to face it eventually. But I see that look in your eyes again. Just like before.”

 

John sighed. “What look?”

 

“You just seem…lost,” Molly offered.

 

“Thanks for the coffee,” John told her, giving her a nod to signal that he was done with the conversation altogether. It took every ounce of his remaining strength not to get angry with her, because at the end of the day, all Molly wanted was to help. She had looked after him since Sherlock’s death and he supposed she had taken it upon herself to look after him now. He knew that he should have been grateful: but right now, he found himself settling for anger because it was easier than gratitude.

 

When John made it home, the house was silent and chilly, and he threw his coat onto the nearby chair. It was raining more heavily outside, and he sighed and leaned back against the front door, dropping his briefcase alongside him. He had grown to hate the quiet. It had been unbearable after the war. After Sherlock. And now, the silence over the house was so thick that it was nearly suffocating.

 

As he fell asleep, he rolled over to Mary’s side of the bed and found it empty.

 

*                                                                        *                                                                        *

 

The next morning, John took lunch alone. He had seen Molly briefly and she had said little. He was fairly certain that it looked like she had been crying, but he decided against asking her what was wrong for now. It was likely that she hadn’t forgotten his sudden departure the previous night, and so he was content instead to sneak away alone. Mike Stamford was likewise a friendly man, but one who had a habit of rambling at times, perhaps laughing a bit too loudly for John’s liking.

 

And so John struck out on his own. It was a sunny day and warmer than the previous day had been, and he was content for a while to walk amidst the London crowds. If nothing else, there was comfort in anonymity among large groups of people in open spaces.

 

He found a diner not far from Bart’s and settled down at a table alone. He placed his order with the waitress, and then pulled a newspaper from his briefcase.

 

 _Dismembered remains dragged from Thames – Scotland Yard baffled_ , the headline screamed in bold type. There was a photograph of several detectives standing over a rocky area along the shoreline, and closer inspection showed a large tarp draped over an area of the ground at their feet.  

 

“Excuse me.” A voice intruded, and John looked up to see a man in his thirties standing near his table and clutching a coffee in his hands. “You’re John Watson, aren’t you.”

 

He considered his options: the young man obviously wasn’t armed, and therefore wasn’t out to kill him. His jacket was expensive but not extravagant, and the outline of a gun of any size would have been evident in his pocket or at his waist. He stood with posture that John knew all too well, and his wearied face made him recognize something familiar in the man despite caution. His skin was relatively fair, so that told John that he had either not been deployed at all or had been back from the desert for long enough for the tan lines to fade.

 

“That depends,” John said, folding the newspaper. “Who are you?”

 

“Sergeant Robert McDowell,” the younger man said, offering his hand. “British Army, Third Division.”

 

“Third Division,” John said, taking this information in. “Kuwait’s practically a vacation.”

 

“I’m sorry? I was deployed to Iraq, sir,” the man who called himself Robert said, looking confused.

 

John shrugged. “I know that. The question was whether or not you did.”

 

Paranoia wasn’t a new addition to John’s life. Ever since Sherlock’s death there had been questions. Glances. Innuendos. If the man behind it all had been a fraud, after all, what did that make his faithful companion? He could see it in people’s eyes even three years later – that hint of recognition, immediately followed by suspicion. He knew that there were people out there that believed he was somehow in on Sherlock Holmes’s elaborate ruse. Others simply branded him a fool. It was the latter faction that he couldn’t stand.

 

“Can I help you with something?” John asked after a moment more of studying the younger man in absolute silence. There was no doubt that he was military – he could spot a soldier in a crowd from a mile away. It wasn’t just the tendency to short haircuts, or tan lines, or the way men carried themselves anymore.

 

He had seen a series of photographs once that catalogued soldiers before, during, and after being deployed. He had studied it for a long while, sitting there in the flat at Baker Street, stared at it for so long that his tea had gone cold in the meantime. There was something namelessly sad in their eyes as the photos progressed, and John had wondered how his own eyes might have changed since the war. Sherlock had come in while John was sitting there still looking. It had been early on, not too long after the cipher case, and he had at the time still not been sure exactly how Sherlock Holmes would respond to any particular situation.

 

John remembered for a moment how Sherlock had, without saying a word, looked over his shoulder at the laptop screen, hesitated for a moment, and then taken his teacup from him, gone into the kitchen, and fixed him a fresh cup of tea. He didn’t recall how much longer he had spent looking into the eyes of the soldiers on the screen after that, but he did recall staring at his reflection hours later and trying to see if he had that same look in his eyes. He had done the same thing about three days after Sherlock died.

 

Robert McDowell had that same look. That indescribable emptiness hidden behind a smile, a sort of uneasy sense of calm that came with unrelenting fear and loss and horror beyond what a normal human had seen, and so John – who knew all too well how deceiving appearances could be – could see the look of a soldier in the man’s eyes.

 

“Do you mind if I sit?” Robert asked.

 

“Go ahead.”

 

“As for helping me, I’m not sure if there’s anything you can do,” Robert said. “My mum thinks I’m just being paranoid. Says I need counseling. That it’s PTSD. I say it’s that I’m paying attention.”

 

“I don’t know what you mean. Sorry,” John said, shaking his head.

 

“You used to solve crimes,” Robert said.

 

“Depends on who you ask,” John said. “If you ask one group, I helped a fake stage crimes that he then solved for attention. If you ask another group, I was conned by a sociopath desperate for recognition and I’m incredibly stupid. If you ask certain corners of the internet or the people with the cans of spray paint, then yeah, I used to _help_ solve crimes.”

 

“Right,” Robert said, frowning. “It’s just I don’t know where else to go with this, you know? The police won’t listen to me. To them it’s open and shut. But there’s something…not right about it.”

 

“About what?”

 

“Lost a good mate of mine not long ago,” Robert told him. He fiddled with a hangnail on his thumb as he spoke, and John saw something in the man’s expression shift from nervous but relaxed to something filled with grief. “It was murder – no one’s arguing that much. The police think it was over a gambling debt he couldn’t pay. That was Jack’s problem, owing people money. I told him a thousand times he was going to get himself killed.”

 

“And he did.”

 

“One way or another, yeah, I guess,” Robert said. “Someone shot him in his own flat. His housekeeper found him at his desk. He was just…checking his e-mail. And the next minute, he was gone.”

 

“Sounds like the police are on the right track,” John said. “If he owed someone money, a gambling debt, then it sounds like someone decided to collect, one way or another.”

 

“But that’s the thing, Doctor Watson. I knew Jack. Maybe I played a little cards with him sometimes,” Robert said, shaking his head. “He may have owed a bloke some money, but he didn’t have an enemy one in this entire town. Everyone liked him. He was a good man.”

 

“Even good men put themselves in bad situations,” John told him.

 

“The last time we talked he said he was scared. But he wouldn’t tell me why,” Robert told him. “He told me everything. But he said he’d messed up and he wouldn’t say how. Said it was better if I didn’t know anything. I thought maybe he’d lost a bet to the wrong man. But when I asked him if he owed anyone money – thought maybe I could help him, because he was so scared – he said it wasn’t that. The last time I spoke to him, he said he didn’t owe anybody anything.”

 

“Well apparently he lied,” John shrugged. “That’s what people do.”

 

“Not him,” Robert said. “Jack would offer you the shirt off his back if you needed it. Never met a stranger. He bailed me out once when I needed help, and I’ve done the same for him. If it was money, he wouldn’t have lied to me.”

 

“How do you know that?” John asked, waiting for the waitress to walk away before asking the question. Robert’s hands shook a little when he spoke, and he had a particularly nervous way of talking that made John wonder if he wasn’t suffering from PTSD.

 

Robert looked John in the eye, and John could see the grief in them. “He was my best friend, Doctor Watson. For longer than I can remember. He knew I could’ve helped him but he wouldn’t tell me what was going on. And now he’s dead and no one will listen to me.”

 

“So if it wasn’t a gambling debt in need of paying, what was it? If he didn’t have any enemies, I mean,” John said. “Is it possible he had something going on in his life that you didn’t know about? Something he’d keep from you on purpose?”

 

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be talking to you,” Robert said. “I’d be out there chasing down whoever _really_ did this.”

 

“And you think I’m the one who can help you. Sorry to tell you, Sergeant, but I’m just a blogger,” John said. “And I can’t even make that claim anymore. I can’t help you anymore than that waitress could.”

 

“I don’t believe that,” Robert said. “I’ve done everything I can to get the police to listen to me. But they say it’s ‘open and shut’ and all they need is to track down who he owed money to. That’ll take them years, and they won’t find anything. Something happened to him and I just…I need to know why.”

 

“I told you, I don’t do that anymore,” John said. His patience was wearing thin. For all his good intentions and his insistence that something was wrong, Robert McDowell was placing his faith in the wrong person, several years too late.

 

“I know, and I’m sorry to ask,” Robert said. “But Jack was the only person who didn’t treat me differently when I came back from over there. We’d been mates for years. When I came back, I didn’t know if I was going to make it. And he took care of me. I think I owe him something, but I can’t do it alone. I can’t see things the way you can.”

 

“I don’t see _anything_ ,” John snapped suddenly, and he regretted in when he saw how Robert recoiled at the outburst. “I’m sorry. I just mean…I’m not a detective. I’m a doctor who just buried his wife and I’m just trying to have lunch. Sherlock Holmes, he could’ve helped you. But he’s gone too.”

 

“Then you know what this feels like,” Robert said, his voice softer and more reserved. “Losing your best friend and not being able to do thing about it. I’m not asking you to solve a case. I just need something to go on. A name, a scrap of paper, anything. Please. I don’t have much, but I can pay.”

 

John looked down at the plate in front of him and realized that he was no longer hungry. He pushed it away, and glanced out the window for a long while, considering.

 

“I don’t want your money,” John said.

 

“What does that mean?” Robert asked. There was a faint glimmer of hope in his eyes, and John saw it.

 

“It means that I’ll take a look. One look, and see what I can find out. I’m not a private detective, a consulting one, or any of it, but I’ll look into it,” John said. “But realize that this isn’t really my area, and don’t be surprised when I come up with absolutely nothing.”

 

“Oh, my God. Thank you,” Robert said.

 

“I need all the information you have about your friend. I’ll do what I can, and I’ll contact you,” John said. He fished around in his briefcase for a business card. “Here’s my information.”

 

Robert McDowell took the card and for the first time since he had approached John’s table, he smiled. “God bless you.” 


	4. Chapter 4

For a week, Robert McDowell’s collection of unorganized research sat in a file folder on John’s desk at home, and he didn’t open it. Sometimes he stared at it, glared at it, even contemplated opening it, but something always stopped him just short of reaching for it. It wasn’t the first time that something like this had happened, and he was certain it wouldn’t be the last.

 

It was obnoxious enough that people still recognized him from the papers and the blog three years later. It was even more upsetting that there were still people out there who, for whatever reason, were foolish enough to appeal to him for help.

 

These days it was less common than it had been before. The papers had all gobbled up the story of the phony detective and the falsely accused villain, and the hapless Army doctor taken in by it all hadn’t gone unnoticed either. Desperate people would stop him in the streets, leave comments on the blog that he hadn’t touched in three years, and on one particularly infuriating occasion, harass Mrs. Hudson for information.

 

Three years seemed like a lifetime ago, and it seemed at times as though John could feel every single second of it from the beginning. Mary had helped to take some of the stress of it away. He had trusted her, which was a rare claim to make in his world. Now she was gone and he was left only with memories of people he didn’t have anymore. Losing Sherlock had been difficult enough; losing Mary had been a long process that part of him had fought until the very end. The idiot in him had asked for a miracle again, months ago, and as usual, no one bothered to listen. He wondered if perhaps he had used up his good karma somewhere back in Afghanistan. And then he wondered if it had been worth it.

 

Tonight was a quiet night spent at home, and it was one of the first times he had been alone in the flat for an extended amount of time since Mary’s death. His superior at Bart’s had suggested a day off after reviewing timesheets, and John had no logical argument against it. He had slept most of the day. Ordered takeout, watched TV alone. It somehow seemed less enjoyable without Mary there to provide commentary, as she had always been apt to do. Her spot on the sofa was empty, and John had settled in a chair instead.

 

When the sun went down, he made himself a cup of tea and settled himself in the study to catch up on some paperwork. Half an hour in he had glanced over to the area of the study that Mary’s things still occupied, and he had dumped the tea and poured scotch instead.

 

The skull was grinning at him from the mantle, and John scowled back at it as he raised his glass to his lips. “I know what you’re thinking, and piss off. Harry’s drinking problem doesn’t have to be my drinking problem. I think I’ve earned a drink, don’t you?”

 

The skull didn’t of course reply, as skulls weren’t very good conversationalists. “And now I’m talking to a skull.”

 

Three years and this is where he had ended up: a widower with an empty flat, a veteran that everyone seemed to forget, a doctor who went through the motions not out of altruism, but as a distraction, which was what work had become. It had been different when he had someone to come home to, someone who made him feel as though what he was doing what important. Now, he didn’t even have that.

 

Before that had been something else entirely. There were times when Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes and murder cases seemed like a fevered dream. To an outsider, the whole thing did seem mad, and John couldn’t deny that. It was too much of a leap of faith for the world to believe it all: a man who didn’t know the solar system but could summarize a person’s existence at a glance. Breaking into secret labs. Tracking down Chinese smugglers. It sounded like a work of fiction and John’s blog was sometimes considered as such. Sometimes, John would look back at his blog and find that he didn’t recognize that version of himself anymore, and he hated it.

 

John glanced down at his phone, and considered what Molly had said about therapy. And then he remembered just as quickly the last time had seen his therapist and wondered whether he should just look for a new one instead. The term “unresolved issues” had come up and John didn’t really remember what he had said to her after that, but it had ended with a very awkward and hostile silence.

 

He made a silent decision not to bother with either option, and it occurred to him that he was being both stupid and stubborn. He had come home from Afghanistan angry and without purpose, and Sherlock Holmes had, in his own bizarre way, fixed him. And then, when he lost Sherlock, Mary had picked up the pieces all over again. John had, for a while, been foolish enough to think that maybe he could have a life after all.

 

Now he was alone again with no one to pick him up and dust him off. No wife to somehow understand what he was feeling even when he couldn’t quite put it into words, and no best friend to deduce what was wrong and offer comfort in whatever way he could piece together.

 

John Watson sat in silence and stared at the closed folder on the corner of the desk, struggling with his own mind. He sat down the scotch, and sighed. He wasn’t Sherlock Holmes. He wasn’t even the man’s blogger anymore. And yet somehow, Robert McDowell expected him to solve a case that he had not even a passing familiarity with. Sherlock had been able to see through everything and everyone – but for John, it was nowhere near that simple. And yet.

 

He swore softly under his breath and grabbed the folder.

 

Jackson Howard, a thirty-four year old accountant, was killed by an unknown assailant while checking his e-mail in his study one evening at around 11:00 p.m. According to the coroner’s report, the cause of death had been a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, and the ballistics report – to which John didn’t have any kind of access – suggested that a revolver had been used. No one reported seeing or hearing anything unusual before, during, or after the murder.

 

Newspaper clippings in the folder told John that the police suspected the killing had occurred as a result of gambling debts; but according to his best friend, he had no debts and no enemies. John noted as he flipped through the information included that Robert McDowell had attached bank statements belonging to the dead man, and he paused for a moment. McDowell’s insistence on proving that it wasn’t debt-related told John a little more than that the dead man had a modest but reasonable amount of money to his name.

 

John hung onto this piece of information for a moment and stored it away for the next time he spoke with Robert McDowell, and proceeded through the rest of the documents that the dead man’s friend had included. By the end of it, he found himself with no more than a headache and no more proof of anything than he had started with other than some measure of belief that the killing hadn’t been motivated by unpaid debts. After considering for a long while, John grabbed his phone and punched in a number.

 

He met Gregory Lestrade at a pub about half an hour from his flat. The former detective was grayer than he remembered, and he seemed decidedly grim about the whole ordeal from the start. John had practically begged him to listen to what he had to say, and it had taken ten minutes to convince the man to meet him for a beer and to at least look at the file.

 

The axe had swung fairly quickly after Sherlock’s death for several Scotland Yard employees, and Lestrade had been the first to go. He was, after all, the one who had brought the fraudulent detective into actual police work, and so it was only logical that the higher-ups would get rid of him. Lestrade had taken the news with quiet resignation: John wagered that he had known it was going to happen from the minute a warrant for Sherlock’s arrest had been issued.

 

The pub was fairly busy for a weeknight, and John preferred it that way. The last thing he wanted was gawking or eavesdropping, and he was relieved to have to push past several enthused drunks screaming about the Manchester United match to slide down across from Lestrade in a booth near the back of the pub.

 

Lestrade took a sip of his beer. “You look like hell.”

 

“Yeah, thanks, I’ve noticed,” John muttered. “How’s the job?”

 

“Private security? It’s a bloody joke, that’s what it is. I sit on my ass all day and make sure rich people aren’t bothered by commoners. The money’s good, but I hate it,” Lestrade muttered. “How’s Bart’s?”

 

“I turn my brain off for however many hours a day, take care of sick people, and do it all again the next day. But it beats the alternative of sitting at home feeling useless and sorry for myself, I guess,” John said.

 

“Sounds like you need a beer,” Lestrade told him. “This one’s on me.”

 

“Right now I could mainly use a fresh pair of eyes from someone with an actual background in law enforcement.”

 

“The Jackson Howard case. Heard about it on the news. Got a couple of friends left at the Yard talking about it, and they’ve got their heads so far up their asses they can’t see straight on it,” Lestrade said. “Single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Door locked from the inside. No one heard or saw anything out of the ordinary. They say gambling debts, but the best friend says otherwise. Calls the Yard all the time harassing them about it. But I can tell you without even opening that folder you’ve got there that nobody goes through this much trouble without a reason.”

 

“A reason that isn’t money,” John said, sliding the folder across to Lestrade, who took a much larger swig from his beer. “Bank statements show he was living pretty comfortably. All I had to do was search the internet to see that he was currently employed at an accounting firm that has a pretty big client list, so he had money coming in. More than enough to pay off a debt, if he’d had one. So why kill him?”

 

“Look, John. I was a detective long enough to know that sometimes it’s easy to overlook things,” Lestrade said. “That’s why…well, you know. Forensics will bag and tag everything they can get their hands on, but putting together the pieces? It’s harder than it looks, and it takes a lot of time. And even then there’s no guarantee that they haven’t missed something.”

 

“You’re saying I need to go to the crime scene,” John said.

 

“Who the hell said that?” Lestrade asked, raising an eyebrow. “I’m telling you that Scotland Yard will figure it out. _Eventually_. May be a month, may be a year. But they’ll get it eventually.”

 

“I think you know what Sherlock would say to that.”

 

“I’m sure he’d have plenty to say,” Lestrade told him, shaking his head. “If you want my advice – which I’m guessing you do – it’d be to have a beer, go home, and get some rest. You look like you need it, and the last thing you need is to try to become some kind of vigilante. It doesn’t work out well.”

 

John let all of it sink in and was forced to admit that Lestrade had a point. It was this sort of thing that would have appealed to Sherlock in a second, and the same sort of thing that had drawn attention to him. Attention that, in the end, had gotten him killed.

 

Lestrade looked grim, as though attempting to choose his words more carefully than he normally would. “I know things haven’t exactly been easy for you, John. Not for a long time. But you can’t just go off and do stuff like this. Suppose you get somewhere with it – what then? You saw what the papers did. What Moriarty did. It’s the last thing you need.”

 

John settled back in the booth, and shrugged in defeat. He took the folder back from Lestrade and closed it, tucking it back into his briefcase in the booth beside him. “Maybe I will have that beer.”

 

“That’s the spirit,” Lestrade told him. “Can’t save the world, might as well have a drink.”

 

“In three years you’ve never once asked me if he was a fake,” John said suddenly. It was the truth: strangers on the street had stopped and asked. Reporters had shoved microphones in his faced and asked the same thing. Comments on his blog followed suit. Everywhere he went, people questioned him about Sherlock Holmes. But never Lestrade.

 

Lestrade downed the rest of his beer, and went to get up to fetch them both one. He paused, and shrugged. “I told you once that he was a great man and that if we were lucky, he might be a good one someday. Nothing that happened is going to change my mind about that. It’s easy for people that didn’t spend time with him not to believe it. But he was brilliant, and he saved a lot of lives and did a lot of good whether he wanted to admit it or not. He was a right dick sometimes, but at least he was honest about it.”

 

An hour later, John said goodnight to Lestrade and hailed a cab. When he slid down in the back seat, the cabbie waited in silence for an address, and John weighed his options. He could follow Lestrade’s advice and go home and forget all about this, which was what a reasonable man might do. Or he could go to a crime scene he wasn’t authorized to be at and snoop around, and only hope that he didn’t get caught.

 

“Where you headed?” the cabbie asked finally.

 

John glanced back at the door of the pub and realized that Lestrade was absolutely right: this was a terrible idea, and that it could get him killed. He nodded to himself and made a decision.

 

“427 Park Lane,” John said. “But I need to make a stop first.”

 

“Where to, then?”

 

John sucked in a breath and stared out the window. “221B Baker Street.”

 

*                                                                        *                                                                        *

 

When John and Mary had first moved in together, Mary had been patient when it came to the living conditions John was used to. It had been she who plopped the skull down on the mantle without batting an eye. She had been very patient with John re-learning the concept of the actual use of a kitchen table, and had been polite but forceful about throwing things about the house and leaving them where they came to rest.

 

The one thing she refused to budge on or tolerate had been the idea of guns. It wasn’t that they frightened her. But something about the idea of them lying around the flat, even locked up, made her nervous. It had been a long and drawn out debate but in the end, Mary had won out, and so there were no guns inside the flat.

 

John glanced at his watch before ringing the bell at 221B: it was nearly 11:00 at night already, and he was unsure of whether Mrs. Hudson would still be awake. She greeted him looking sleepy and a little worried about a minute later. He had quietly asked for the keys to the flat upstairs and she had given them to him: she didn’t ask questions, and John was glad.

 

It had been years since John had been upstairs to the flat. He had come to visit Mrs. Hudson on occasion, but never ventured upstairs. She never mentioned it, and neither did he, and it was a sort of unspoken rule between them. While Mrs. Hudson waited downstairs, John climbed up to the closed door of the flat he had once called home, unlocked the door, and stepped inside.

 

It was cold and smelled like rain inside the flat, and John grimaced a bit at the sight of that terrible wallpaper. He had never quite forgotten it, but it was different seeing it in person again. Mrs. Hudson hadn’t rented the flat again when John moved out, and she had never given any reason as to why. John had a feeling he knew the answer, but it was realizations like those that he couldn’t stand to think about for too long.

 

He turned on the lights and closed the door behind him. He leaned back against it for a moment to collect his thoughts. Most of the items that formerly occupied the flat were gone, leaving behind only remnants of the flat John had known before. He bit back a smile when he saw the bullet holes still in the wall over a sofa covered in plastic. Bookshelves rested, empty, against the walls: the books now resided in John’s study on different shelves. Chairs sat covered near the fireplace, and John didn’t linger there for long.

 

He passed through the closed door that led to Sherlock’s bedroom and found it largely emptied. The closet door was ajar, and John hoped that no one had bothered to dig too deeply into it. He found the lockbox where he had left it, tucked into the back corner of the closet, and pulled it out. John unlocked the box and didn’t hesitate to grab the handgun from inside, sliding it into the pocket of his jacket after making sure the safety was on. Beneath where the gun had rested was a police badge bearing Lestrade’s identification, and John grabbed it as well.

 

He didn’t stay in the flat any longer than he had to, and with a quick goodbye to Mrs. Hudson, he was out onto the street again and back inside his cab.

 

“427 Park Lane,” the cabbie repeated.

 

“Yeah,” John muttered, staring out the cab window up at the darkened windows of 221B until the cab pulled out into the night.

 

It was a short drive, and John paid his cabbie and waited until the car disappeared off into the night before crossing the street and making his way down the block to a row of neatly arranged homes. Cars lined the well-kept and relatively upscale neighborhood, and John stuffed his hands into his pockets as a bitter wind swept down over the street. It was late and he hoped that most of the residents of the neighborhood were already asleep.

 

He knew which house belonged to Jack Howard almost instantly when he came to it. There was police tape around what small yard there was at the home, and John considered his options for a moment. He didn’t see any officers or patrol cars anywhere. There were no lights on inside the house.

 

John didn’t realize until he was fumbling to pick the lock to the front door that his hands were shaking. He steadied himself as best he could and tried to remain calm, praying under his breath that no one noticed him. The street was calm and quiet, and the slightest disturbance might insight a family dog to bark. John paused and collected himself, willing away the growing feeling of anxiety and dread in the pit of his stomach, and began again. Sherlock had shown him how to pick locks a long time ago and so, as he went through the motions, he repeated the steps in his mind exactly as Sherlock had explained them. After a few moments there was a satisfying click from the door, and John tried the knob. This time, he didn’t stop himself from smiling when he made it inside without further error.

 

The house had been torn apart by police and forensics already, and John decided to spend as much time at the actual scene of the crime as possible, and so he quickly climbed the stairs up to the study where, according to police and to Robert McDowell, Jackson Howard had been murdered.

 

John Watson was used to crime scenes, and the one he entered now was, from what he could tell, largely unremarkable. The office was, before being ransacked by police, a comfortable and well-used looking space. John’s eyes came to rest instantly on the desk that sat facing the doorway, and he could make out in the darkness a peculiar pattern of dried blood on the desk. Robert McDowell had said that his friend was shot while checking his e-mail, and John could make out the outline of where the blood ended and the laptop would have begun.

 

From what John knew of the case, the door to the study was locked from the inside, and the autopsy report suggested that the bullet had entered through the back of his skull. He went to the window, which was closed, and glanced down to the flowerbed below, left entirely undisturbed. It was impossible, he realized, that someone had broken into the office through the window or had exited through it. He stood there in silence for a moment, puzzling over it much as most of Scotland Yard probably was.

 

How did a man die from a gunshot wound that no one saw, heard, or so much as noticed until the housekeeper came in? Where had the shot come from? How was any of this possible with the door locked from the inside? John stared from the desk and back to the window – closed, and with no bullet hole or any other signs of distress.

 

“Open window,” John muttered. “But everyone’s alibi checks out – none of the neighbors ever heard or saw anything. That’s not possible. Maybe…maybe the killer was here all along. Waiting until he returned home.”

 

John looked around the room for a place that would have made a suitable hiding spot, and found nothing that wouldn’t have been in the dead man’s line of sight.

 

“No,” John said, shaking his head. “He would’ve turned on the lights and seen someone in here. He would’ve noticed and tried to escape. Unless it was someone he knew and expected. Someone he trusted.”

 

Outside, a sudden commotion caused John to jump as though hearing gunfire. There was a sudden rattling of trashcans somewhere below, and John went to the window in time to see what appeared to be a drunken man stumbling and falling amidst the garbage in the neighboring yard. His heart pounded and he tried to remain calm despite the sudden shock of the noise, and it was at this point that he heard something decidedly more frightening: footsteps downstairs. He sucked in a breath of air and froze. From what he could tell there were two people on the first floor of the flat. He considered his options: he could attempt to hide, but he didn’t know the layout of the flat well enough for that. Or, he could risk going out the window, but it was likely that he would injure himself in the process. Then there was the third option, which involved being handcuffed and processed, and that damned sure wasn’t going to happen.

 

John swallowed whatever fear he had and opened the window. He glanced down at the drop from the second story of the flat, and then back upward again. Something tugged at his brain for a moment, but in the panic of the moment, the thought was lost as quickly as it had come to him.

 

Beneath the window and in the neighboring yard, the drunkard was on his feet again, stumbling about in the darkness. Only now, he had gone from thrashing about in the rubbish to singing “Danny Boy” at the top of his lungs, slurring through verses and more shouting in a barely intelligible voice than he was singing. John heard the footsteps downstairs change course as he leaned out of the window and tried to screw up the courage to jump: his heart pounded. He could cope more with a sprained ankle more than he could jail time or further harassment from the papers, he decided.

 

He hit the ground hard and it knocked the wind out of him, and he lay there in silence for a moment as he watched two plainclothes detectives hurrying from Jack Howard’s flat to the neighboring yard in pursuit of the drunk. John listened to the detectives calling after the man, and he tried his best to remain silent. He hadn’t broken anything in the fall, and he was fairly certain he could run.

 

He pulled himself to his feet and went around the back of the home and into the small yard behind it: there was a fence that divided Howard’s property and the neighbor behind him, and John hoisted himself up over it and into the next yard. Cutting across, he ran through the grass and out onto the next street over, gasping for air and seemingly panicked.

 

“Shit.” After taking a moment to gather his wits and catch his breath, John took off down the street again. 


	5. Chapter 5

“You haven’t slept.” Harry was staring at him with a look that was just shy of accusation, and he knew that she had noticed how he limped slightly when he entered the room. It was lunchtime and he had nearly forgotten that he had agreed to meet his sister for lunch. He had spent the morning at Bart’s nervously reading over Jackson Howard’s coroner’s report when work was slow, and it was his intention to actually go and examine the body himself after his lunch break was over.

 

John wondered whether a lie would be more or less acceptable than the truth. “Late night.”

 

“How late are we talking, exactly?” Harry asked, raising her coffee cup to her lips. Her eyes never left him, and it reminded John a little of the look their mother used to get when she was suspicious of something they had done as children.

 

“Went out for a beer with Greg,” John said. “I couldn’t sleep after that, so I was up all night watching crap telly.”

 

“I’m not stupid, you know,” Harry told him, sitting down her cup. “You’ve had that same ‘I’m up to something’ look since you were seven years old. And unless you’re the dumbest man alive, I have a hard time believing you turned your ankle watching telly.”

 

“And if I told you it wasn’t any of your business?” John asked. He was tired, and more than a little rattled and preoccupied. The last thing he wanted to do was spend his lunch being interrogated by his sister.

 

“Then I’d tell you that whether you like it or not, I’m your sister, and it _is_ my business,” Harry said. “Somebody’s got to look out for you.”

 

“I’m a grown man.”

 

“A grown man who’s lying like a teenager who skipped out in the middle of the night.”

 

“Can’t you just let it go?” John snapped.

 

Harry fell silent for a moment, and John saw something in her expression shift when he got angry. “I know we’re not exactly close, John. I did a lot of dumb things for a long time. But the one thing I always tried to do was look after you, even if I did do a shit job of it most of the time. If you’re saying it’s none of my business because it really isn’t, then that’s fine. But if you’re telling me that because you’ve done something stupid, then that just worries me.”

 

John sat down his fork, and looked at his sister. “You’re really not going to like what I have to say, Harriet.”

 

“Try me. I’ve got time and swear words to spare,” she said.

 

“A week ago a man approached me at lunch about a friend of his that had been murdered. Wanted me to look into it – you know that still happens sometimes. I told him I wasn’t interested, but he was just so bloody desperate that I didn’t know what else to do other than say I’d take a look,” John told her. “I sat on it for a week. And then last night, I just couldn’t anymore.”

 

“John.” Harry stared at him as though trying to work out a puzzle. “It’s been three years. You told me a week after that you’d never do any of that again.”

 

“I know what I said, and…I was wrong,” John said, shaking his head. “Last night I went for a drink with Lestrade. He tried to talk me out of it too, but I went to the crime scene to see what I could find out.”

 

Harry didn’t speak for a long while. She sat back in her chair and stared out the window of the restaurant, and John honestly couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

 

“It’s never enough, is it,” she said finally.

 

“What?”

 

“You nearly died in the desert, John. You can’t tell me you’ve forgotten that. When you came back to London I was relieved because I thought, at least here, I know he’ll be safe. And the next thing I know, you’re blogging about murderers and crime scenes. Being strapped to bombs. It’s like no matter how many times you put yourself in that kind of danger, it’s never enough for you,” Harry said. “Your best friend died trying to be a superhero, and here you are. Doing the same thing.”

 

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” John told her. General grumpiness was quickly mutating into anger, and he very badly wanted to be anywhere but near his sister. Harry had been supportive and as gentle as was possible for her over the past three years, but now, he could tell that both of their tempers were spiraling quickly toward the tipping point.

 

“I’m a drunk, not an idiot,” Harry said. “When Sherlock died you said you were done with all of it. You nearly punched a reporter. More than once, if I remember it just right. You were alone, and you were angry, and I understand that. And then you got married and I thought, ‘If ever there was a woman to keep him in line, that’s her.’ And now she’s gone to, and what do you do? You run off and go housebreaking and do exactly what you said you wouldn’t anymore. You need help, John.”

 

“I don’t need _anything._ Certainly not advice from you, thank you very much,” John shot back.

 

“We’ve called each other every name in the book for decades, and you can hate me if you want,” Harry said. “Everyone tiptoes around you because they’re afraid of upsetting you. But maybe that’s the trouble.”

 

“No offense, Harriet, but maybe you should work on your problems, not mine. I’m fine, and I know what I’m doing.”

 

“Getting yourself killed isn’t going to bring anyone back,” she told him, looking him in the eye. “What would Mary say?”

 

John looked out the window now instead of at Harry. “Leave her out of this.”

 

“You had a nice, normal life. What’s so terrible about that?” Harry asked him.

 

“Exactly what you just said. I _had_ that. Past tense. I can’t stand that flat. I can’t stand work. I’m right back where I started when I came back to London and I don’t have anything anymore,” John said, clenching his fist so hard under the table that he felt the skin of his palm break under the pressure of his fingernails.

 

“And you think old habits are going to fix that?” Harry asked.

 

“I think that it’s none of your business,” John repeated. “If I wanted a therapist to talk at me, I’d pay for one. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.”

 

John left money for his lunch on the table and gathered his things without another word. Harry made no move to stop him, and John left the restaurant and stepped back out into the streets of London without glancing back at her again. His entire body was hot with anger – but an anger that was markedly different from his usual contempt for his sister. This was something that ran much deeper and hurt far more, and he realized that later, he would likely regret being so harsh with her. But for now, he was happy to settle for being angry.

 

It took him a moment to realize that his phone was ringing in his pocket, and when he answered it, anger transformed into something entirely different. Something nameless, cold, and meandering between fear and astonishment.

 

John nearly dropped the phone as he listened to what Molly was telling him. “Say that again.”

 

*                                                                        *                                                            *

 

Molly Hooper seldom looked frightened or outright stunned: she had spent plenty of years performing autopsies and she had, John knew, therefore seen all sorts of horrific things. Some of them made for interesting dinner conversation, and some of them did not. Yet Molly was always respectful and never squeamish, but something was different when John stepped into the morgue this time. He noticed that Molly looked pale, and she played with her necklace in a nervous sort of twitch that he had never really noticed before.

 

The last time John had seen Kitty Riley, she had been alive and well in her flat, insisting that Jim Moriarty was a work of fiction. He had seen her name on dozens of articles in the papers in the months and years to come as debates continued to rage as to whether Sherlock Holmes was a lie. Three years later, her alleged claim to fame had somewhat failed her: for a while, the papers stuck with the story, but eventually, political scandals and other more tantalizing stories began making their way onto the cover, and she had struggled to keep up without another big scoop.

 

Three years had passed and now, Kitty Riley was dead. It had been one thing for Molly to say it on the phone, and another for John to see her with his own eyes. He scarcely remembered the cab ride back to Bart’s, or making his way to the mortuary. He stood over the young woman’s body and was, for the moment, speechless.

 

“She didn’t show up for work today. Wasn’t answering her phone, either,” Molly said, finally breaking the silence. “A friend stopped by to check on her today and found her. If I had to guess I’d say…”

 

“She’s only been dead for a few hours,” John said, swallowing, feeling the weight of his words as he spoke them. He had seen death before in all of its various and horrific forms. He had seen comrades ravaged by heavy-duty weapons and artillery fire. He had killed men himself. Those deaths, he reasoned, were kinder than anything Kitty Riley had experienced before she died.

 

“She was alive for all of it,” Molly said. “Bruising and clotting confirms it.”

 

Kitty Riley’s body was uncovered for the moment, and it was easy to see why. Her body was a landscape of cuts, deep bruises, and signs of prolonged torture that John had seldom seen in his years as a doctor. The young woman’s eyes were open and staring silently upward, still frozen in horror. Her face was swollen and bloodied, her nose obviously broken. John didn’t look too closely, but was fairly sure that at least one of her ears was missing. There were ligature marks around her neck. Burns, cuts, and broken bones were evident. Her fingernails were missing.

 

“Cause of death?” John asked.

 

“Single gunshot wound to the back of the skull,” Molly said. “We recovered the bullet, and forensics is already working on it.”

 

“God.”

 

“John, there’s…something else,” Molly said. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

 

John stared at Molly, not comprehending what she meant, and Molly shook her head and looked away for a moment. “What is it?”

 

“I did the preliminary exam before you arrived. Whoever did this tortured her for hours, I have to catalog every wound as best I can,” Molly said. “I need you to help me turn her over. It’s easier if I just show you.”

 

“Show me what?”

 

“He left a message,” Molly said. “Whoever did this. Clotting was minimal. Right before he shot her, he took the time to leave a message.”

John put on a pair of gloves and grabbed hold of one side of Kitty’s body, and he helped Molly to turn her over onto her side long enough for him to see what Molly meant. His stomach turned as his eyes fell to the two words etched in deep, jagged marks into the young woman’s flesh.

 

_Get Sherlock._

 

It took every ounce of John’s willpower not to drop her, and he instead lowered her down onto her back again. His stomach twisted and the heat of anger turned into an ice-cold feeling of horror and shock.

 

“It can’t be,” John said, shaking his head.

 

“It isn’t,” Molly said. “Jim Moriarty died three years ago. It’s not possible.”

 

“Who would…why would someone do this?”  It was the only question that came to John’s mind. Molly didn’t reply. She was instead beginning the process of rinsing off the body to conduct her examination, and John took a step back from the body as she did so. He watched in stunned silence as the clear water turned pink with blood, revealing more bruised skin underneath bloodstains and open wounds. John excused himself before Molly made her first incision.

 

When John left work, he was unable to shake the image of the words carved into the dead reporter’s back from his mind. Throughout the day he kept going back to Kitty, back to that silent look of terror in her eyes. Part of him attempted to imagine the horror of what she had been through, but he had pushed it aside just as quickly as it came to him. On the cab ride home, John tried to clear his mind, but to no avail. He had not slept in more than a day, and the combination of nearly getting caught at a crime scene, a fight with Harry, and the shock of Kitty Riley’s murder left him reeling. Outside, storm clouds had gathered over London, and stray drops of rain hit the windshield of the cab as it took John toward home.

 

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he saw that it was Robert McDowell calling. John silenced the phone and stuffed it back into his pocket: he had no information that Scotland Yard didn’t already have and the last thing he wanted was to deliver bad news to someone on a night like this.

 

Sitting in his study with a glass of scotch, John tried to focus. He was exhausted, but his mind refused to let him rest. He took a long sip from the glass and then sat it aside, opening his laptop to see what the newspapers were saying about Kitty Riley. The rational part of him said to stay away; but the other, much angrier part of him overpowered it completely.

 

When he came to his e-mail inbox, John felt as though someone had punched him directly in the jaw, and the air in the room suddenly seemed too sparse. A single e-mail, complete with attachments, sat waiting in his inbox, and John shook his head in disbelief as he read the name attached.

 

At 11:00 p.m. the previous night, as John had gone to Baker Street and to a crime scene, Kitty Riley had sent him an e-mail.

_Dr. Watson: I think I’m being followed and I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I think I’ve stumbled upon information I wasn’t meant to see, and believe that I’m being followed. Enclosed is everything I have. Consider it my apology. –Kitty Riley_

John’s hand instinctively went to the flash drive in the nearby drawer. His heart pounded as he fumbled for it and then connected it to the laptop. He had to keep his hands from shaking as he clicked on the attached files that the murdered woman had sent, and his heart skipped a beat when he saw the files she had attached.

 

Proof of falsified birth certificates for Richard Brook. Signed affidavits from those who had known him as an “actor” saying that they had never worked with him. A file from an anonymous source with bank information that traced back to a man named James Moriarty. A trail of bodies spanning the globe, all dead at the hands of snipers. Government documents that contained information about interrogations of James Moriarty, complete with transcripts of, John realized Mycroft Holmes’s conversations with the man.

 

John saved it all to the flash drive, ejected it from the computer, and sucked in a deep breath as though three years of stoicism and quiet grief was finally coming to a head. He thought back to the reporters dragging Sherlock’s name through the mud, and his as well, and to all the spray paint all over the city declaring that someone somewhere still believed in Sherlock Holmes. And now, John Watson had the beginnings of proof. The whispers, after three years, were finally becoming screams, and Kitty Riley had paid for all of this with her life.

 

John’s phone rang again, and he saw that it was Robert McDowell again. He silenced it and shook his head, trying to make sense of everything that was happening but somehow failing for the moment.

 

A knock at the door came, and he froze. His mind was beginning to work again, and he slammed the laptop shut as he realized that whatever information Kitty had given him had gotten her killed. It was likely that eventually, whoever had killed her would track him down as well. He held on to the flash drive for a moment and then made a decision: he tucked it away inside the skull and then, grabbing the handgun from the corner of the desk, went to the door.

 

When he opened it, he was prepared for anything that might come his way. But instead of some crazed assassin, Robert McDowell stood on the other side of the door, looking jittery and uncomfortable. It had begun raining more steadily now, and his hooded sweatshirt was soggy.

 

“Is this a bad time?” he asked.

 

John stared at him for a moment. The last thing on his mind right now was whatever case McDowell had brought to him, and John shook his head as tough trying to focus. “It’s not exactly the _best_ time.”

 

“I’m sorry to bother you. But…I think I’m being followed and I didn’t know who else to call,” Robert said. “The police won’t even take my calls anymore and they think I’m crazy. But I swear to you that someone has been following me ever since you agreed to look into Jack’s death.”

John was no genius nor was he a consulting detective, but he was beginning to see pieces falling into place. Kitty Riley’s death. The e-mail she had sent probably just before her attacker had found his way to her flat. And now Robert McDowell was on his doorstep, terrified that he was being followed.

 

John put the kettle on and left Robert McDowell sitting in the living room trying to shake off the cold and rain that now pervaded the streets outside. It was a brief moment of quiet to try to pull himself together and fight back against exhaustion and shock, and he closed his eyes for a moment and waited for the kettle to come to a boil. He thought back to Kitty Riley’s seemingly rushed e-mail, and then to her empty eyes while she was lying on the slab at Bart’s. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Molly so shaken by a dead body.

 

A few minutes and the tea was ready, and Robert McDowell took a cup from John with shaky hands before sitting down in a chair across from him and tried to keep himself from panicking. Neither man said anything for a long while – John was busy trying to figure out his next move, and the murder case he’d taken a crack at was the furthest thing from his mind. Yet somewhere along the way he had stopped believing in coincidences. It was unlikely that Kitty Riley had believed someone was following her and then ended up dead after trying to contact him, much as it was every bit as unlikely that Robert McDowell was now convinced that someone was following him as well.

 

John realized that Robert had been saying something to him, and he snapped back to reality as the other man looked at him expectantly.

 

“I’m sorry?”

 

“I said you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Robert said. “I’ve spent the past week looking over my shoulder at every turn, but you look even worse than I do.”

 

“It’s nothing,” John told him, shaking his head. “It’s just been one of those days.”

 

“Do they ever go away?” Robert asked him. “The really bad days, I mean. Been home from over there a while myself, and there are still days I wake up and it feels like I never left. I don’t remember what a good night’s sleep feels like, and Jack’s death just…made it all come back, you know?”

 

There was no point in lying to the man about it, John decided. It would be unfair to deny that there were nights when he still woke in a cold sweat with his heart pounding violently against his ribcage. Nights when pain, blood, and death were as clear to him as the day they had happened. He wanted to tell Robert McDowell to consider himself lucky that he hadn’t watched his friend die but he couldn’t find the words, so instead, he took a sip of his tea and set it aside again.

 

“In my experience, it never goes away completely,” John told him. “It’s something that you’ll carry with you forever. War changes you. Losing people changes you. Losing someone close to you leaves scars that run deeper than a bullet can.”

 

“It’s hard when you don’t have anybody,” Robert said. “Jack was all I had left. I’ve got my mum, but she’s so worried about ‘fixing’ whatever’s wrong with me that she doesn’t stop to listen. Jack, he understood. Never seen a damn battlefield in his life, but he knew me.”

 

John didn’t know what to say to this, and so he decided to change the subject. “I went to the crime scene last night. I didn’t find much of anything the police missed. It wasn’t robbery – whatever caused your friend’s death had nothing to do with money. You were right about that much.”

 

Robert broke into a shaky grin, and he nodded as though a weight had been lifted off of him. “I knew it. I bloody knew it.”

 

“As for how and who, I can’t be sure,” John said. “His office was locked from the inside. Either someone came in that he was expecting and wasn’t afraid of, or…or I don’t know. The window, maybe. It’s possible that someone took a shot from a distance. But from where, I can’t be sure. No witnesses, no sound of gunfire, and no evidence of anyone else in the room. To shoot someone with that kind of precision, and from a distance, and at night no less…that takes a steady hand.”

 

“A steady hand,” Robert repeated. He took a sip of his tea and returned the cup to its saucer.

 

“Someone with military or law enforcement training. He wouldn’t have been just a good shot,” John said, more thinking aloud now than anything. “He would have been a great shot. A silencer could account for the neighbors not hearing anything.”

 

“Well deduced, Doctor Watson.” The voice that came out of Robert McDowell’s mouth was not the stuttering, nervous rambling that John was used to from the man. Robert sat his teacup aside, and leaned forward so that his arms were resting against his legs. He studied John closely, and it was in that moment that John saw something shift in the other man’s eyes. It was as though in an instant his entire demeanor changed from that of an unsettled, shell-shocked veteran to something else entirely. Something that John didn’t quite understand, but that chilled him to the bone. He felt the quivering anxiety that had been festering in the pit of his stomach blossom into sharp, stabbing fear.

 

“And the penny dropped,” Robert said. “Someone with military training – I’m impressed. One would think killing Jack Howard would take every bit as much skill and precision as shooting a cabbie.”

 

“Who the hell are you?” It was all John could come up with.

 

“Manners,” Robert said. “It’s an ugly world out there, John. You’ve seen it yourself. If we stop caring about decorum, then what makes us any better than the rest of the animal kingdom?”

 

“You’re not Robert McDowell.”

 

The man who had called himself Robert chuckled, and shook his head. “Robert McDowell is just another role in the grand cast of characters I play. You know better than anyone how easy it is for the world to believe a lie. Who would suspect an Army veteran with roots in the London community, after all?”

 

“Who are you really?” John asked.

 

“This is truly an honor, and I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said, rising from his chair. John realized that his gun was lying on the counter in the kitchen, and that he would likely not make it in time. “I believe we may have a friend or two in common.”

 

“Somehow, I doubt that,” John said.

 

“Sebastian Moran. Delighted, truly, John,” the other man said, smiling as though he could scarcely contain his excitement. “I’ve been an admirer of your work for quite a while now. Always from afar, of course, but I think it’s high time we got a little better acquainted. Considering you have something I want.”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

 

“Don’t pretend to be stupid,” Sebastian told him, sliding down on the sofa so that he was sitting directly next to John’s chair. “By now you’ve already calculated whether you can reach your gun before I stop you, and you know that isn’t going to happen. Right now you’re wondering how it all fits together.”

 

“You killed Jackson Howard,” John said. “And then you came to me in the guise of a friend for _help_ catching his killer.”

 

“As I said, I’ve admired you from afar for a very long time. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and I have to say, I’m definitely impressed,” Sebastian said. “The wounded soldier, fighting to stay afloat in a city full of big, bad, nasty things. The grieving widower. The lost little blogger. Such a moving story. But it’s only the subplot, you see. The important parts – the big finale – that’s where it gets good.”

 

“If you’re going to sit here and talk for this long, you might as well go ahead and kill me,” John told him. “I’m guessing that’s the plan anyway.”

 

“Boss man said you were brave,” Sebastian said. “I can appreciate that. It wasn’t all lies, you know. I was a soldier once. A very long time ago. But someone up above me in the ranks saw something they didn’t like. Maybe they saw how easy it was for me to pull the trigger and move on. So they sent me home with a pat on the back and a warning to be a good boy. Luckily at home there were plenty of people who saw ways to put my talents to use.”

 

“Moriarty.”

 

“And a kewpie doll for the doe-eyed Army doctor,” Sebastian said. “I’ve had you in my sights twice in your life and you’ve never noticed me. You’re a good shot, John. I’d wager I’m better.”

 

“The sniper,” John said. The icy feeling of fear in his stomach had spread throughout his entire body.

 

“Very good,” Sebastian told him. “Now, John – I think I’ll call you John – the next few minutes are very important. If you give me the answers I want, then this goes fairly easily. If you decide to play games with me, then…let’s just say you’ve seen my handiwork once today. My boss had a policy against getting his hands dirty. I don’t.”

 

“Kitty Riley,” John said. Fear multiplied into nausea and panic.

 

“Spunky one, she was,” Sebastian said, producing a slender, long black box from the pocket of his coat. “She tried to lie to me. So before I was done, I cut her tongue out. She was a little trooper. I’ll bet you’re even more impressive.”

 

“I don’t know anything,” John said. His voice didn’t shake as he spoke, and he looked Sebastian Moran in the eye when he spoke.

 

“Now, now. Lying isn’t exactly polite, and we were getting along so well before,” Sebastian said. “To my credit, it was one hell of a performance. The grieving best friend, seeking justice for his fallen comrade. All I had to do was hit all the right notes with you, and you ate right out of my hand.”

 

“What’s the point of all this, anyway? What does it matter what a reporter dug up on your old boss? As I recall it, he’s old news now anyway. No one gives a damn about Jim Moriarty anymore,” John said, shaking his head.

 

Sebastian laughed, and shook his head. “Of course you’d see it that way. In the world according to John Watson, no one grieves the villain. Because after all, who would care if someone so horrible put a bullet in his own brain? Tell me…what did it feel like watching Sherlock jump?”

 

“It’s not the same,” John said. “And as far as I’m concerned, you can go fuck yourself.”

 

“Struck a nerve, didn’t I,” Sebastian said. “Sherlock Holmes saved your life, didn’t he. All those years ago. You came back battered and broken. A little bird with a broken wing, and he put you back together without ever meaning to. I was just like you once, you see – but Jim saw my full potential. He saw what I was, and he never turned away. Not once.”

 

“You’re insane,” John said, unadulterated horror seeping into every corner of his being as he realized what was happening. “You can’t think he cared.”

 

“Even the loneliest and the greatest of men trust someone,” Sebastian said. “How many other friends did Sherlock have? Had he _ever_ had?”

 

“Say his name again, and I will kill you,” John said. There was a tremor in his voice now. Fear and rage swirled into a confusing cacophony in his brain. He thought back to Kitty Riley lying on an autopsy table at Bart’s.

 

“You can relax…I’m not going to kill you,” Sebastian said. “At least not right now. Because that would defeat the whole purpose of everything, now wouldn’t it? It’s not your day to die, Doctor Watson. But that doesn’t mean you need all of your fingers in order to survive. I can cut you in ways your worst nightmares can’t capture, and you’ll wish for death. But I’m not leaving here without the information I need.”

 

“And what information is that, exactly? A bit of second-rate information about your boss’s piss poor cover up?” John asked.

 

“I’m here out of loyalty,” Sebastian said, “but don’t think for a second that you’ll gain the upper hand by trying to upset me. I’ve done things you can’t even begin to imagine. All because he asked me to. Only I’m in charge now, and I’m not nearly so…elegant. I don’t have a problem with blood on my hands, and you’ve had it coming for a while. I’m going to ask you a question, and I expect an answer. And don’t lie to me, John. I don’t like it when people lie to me.”

 

“And how do I know you’re not lying to me right now? Suppose you torture me, and then get what you want. How do I know you won’t kill me like you killed that poor girl?” John asked.

 

“Because you’re special,” Sebastian told him, his grin widening. “You’re a pawn on the board, but even pawns have their value. You’re worth more to me alive than you are dead. I may be a murderer, but at least I’m honest.”

 

John took a deep breath, and steeled himself as best he could. “What is it you’re looking for, Mister Moran?”

 

Sebastian busied himself by unlatching the thin black box, and he nodded as though excited by John’s answer. “That’s more like it. It’s fairly simple, really. Just…tell me where he is.”

 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

 

“Sherlock Holmes. Tell me where he is,” Sebastian repeated, his eyes never wavering as he stared John down. John noticed that as he talked, he was preparing a syringe with expert dexterity, and he gaped at the man.

 

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” John snapped. “He’s been dead for three years. Where do you think he is?”

 

“Don’t lie to me, John. I don’t take kindly to it,” Sebastian told him.

 

“I’m not lying. I watched him die. I attended his funeral. He’s gone, and I don’t know what you’re talking about. I swear to God,” John said, his voice becoming more frantic than he would have liked.

 

Sebastian Moran held the syringe up for inspection, and then turned his attention back to John. “You’re sure that’s the answer you’re going to go with? Think hard, John, about what I did to Miss Riley. As far as I’m concerned you’re culpable for Jim Moriarty’s death, and that makes you fair game. Wipe that stupid, clueless look off your face, and cut the bullshit.”

 

“Sherlock Holmes is dead,” John repeated, his voice stronger and more pronounced this time.

 

Sebastian laughed, and it was as though someone had told a joke that John wasn’t privy to. “We’re a funny little group, criminals. Discretion is obviously a must – but at the end of the day, it’s all a matter of who comes out on top. Jim knew he’d die on that rooftop, and I was instructed not to interfere. I honored his wishes, and did as I was told. I kept my scope trained on you. And I thought perhaps it was over that day. For me, for all of us. But then…the most peculiar thing began to happen.”

 

“I can see why Moriarty liked you,” John said, screwing up a bit of courage. “You really are in love with the sound of your voice.”

 

“Speak to me like that again and you won’t have a voice left to mock me with, do you understand?” Sebastian said. “Anyway, where was I. Oh, yes. The great deception. A few months after the dust settled…associates of mine began to go missing. Some were taken into custody by government bodies with no names. Others turned up dead. Some of them vanished without a trace. And that’s where the rumors started.”

 

“Rumors? What rumors?”

 

“This is just too good,” Sebastian told him, patting John on the knee for emphasis. “I’ve been looking forward to this – hoping that he didn’t tell you so that I could see the look on your face. So that _I_ could be the one to tell you.”

 

The air in the room seemed unbearably heavy all of the sudden, and John struggled to keep his breathing calm. Sebastian Moran gave the syringe a thump, and gave a purposeful look to John.

 

“I promise this part won’t hurt much,” Sebastian said. “I may not be a doctor, but I’ve had a fair amount of practice. The more you struggle, the worse it will be.”

 

“Tell me _what_ ,” John said through gritted teeth.

 

“Patience is a virtue,” Sebastian said. “That’s what Jim would always tell me, anyway. And I’ve been patient, John. Oh, so very patient. But it’s time to stop playing the waiting game and draw him out. And I can’t think of a better way to get Sherlock Holmes to come out and play than to put the very thing that made him take that leap back in the line of fire.”

 

John stumbled to his feet and backed away from Sebastian Moran as quickly as he could, and he quickly considered how he might best escape. The flash drive was in the study, which was currently inaccessible because of Moran. His gun was in the kitchen where he had left it. There was a back door that he might be able to reach before the other man caught up to him, and he decided that it was his best bet in a moment of panic.

 

John bolted for the door and Sebastian was quick on his heels. John flung open the door and didn’t waste time looking behind him, ducking out into the small back yard of his home. He turned and looked around for anything he could use as a weapon against his new assailant, and found nothing. It was dark and the rain was coming down in sheets, and so he resigned himself to escaping from the flat entirely. He hade it to the fence at the edge of the property and attempted to hoist himself up over it, and he slid and hit the ground in a muddy splash on the same side.

 

Sebastian hoisted John back to his feet by the collar of his jacket, and slammed him back against the wooden fence with such force that it knocked the wind out of John completely. Sebastian brought a heavy forearm down across John’s throat, and John felt a sudden pinching pain as the other man pushed the syringe down into the side of his neck.

 

Sebastian struck him hard across the face and John tasted blood instantly, and he fought back as best he could. The combination of the fall, the blow to the face, and the unknown drug now pulsing through his veins had made him dizzy, and he knew that it was only a matter of minutes before he was completely defenseless. He slumped down and slackened against the fence, and Sebastian Moran smiled and chucked the syringe aside.

 

He knelt in front of John, and looked him in the eye. “Boss really was right – you are stupidly brave, aren’t you.”

 

John felt a stab of relief at the feeling of the pocketknife in his hand that he had managed to produce before Moran reached him, and he flicked the blade open in a swift motion. He swung hard and caught the side of Moran’s face, tearing a jagged gash that ran from the corner of his mouth to his cheekbone. The other man’s eyes went wide with a mixture of shock and rage, and John stumbled back to his feet as the other man staggered and collapsed.

 

He knew it wouldn’t be enough to debilitate him for long, and so, John made a decision: he could already feel his body reacting to whatever had been in the syringe. The world was beginning to spin and his muscles quivered. He didn’t know how far he would make it on foot, but he had to try. He stumbled back into the house and grabbed the gun from the counter, taking a few moments to lean on it and steady himself before willing himself to stumble into the study. Dizziness intruded as he stuffed the flash drive into his pocket, and by the time he made it to the street, he could hear Sebastian Moran tearing through the flat that he and Mary had shared.

 

He ran as fast as his legs could carry him, and he didn’t look back. His body felt as though it weighed a tone and the streetlights all ran together in a sudden haze. John clutched the gun with quivering fingers as the world spun more violently, and he could not be sure how many blocks he had made it. He was faintly aware that he was bleeding, but he didn’t feel any pain.

 

He ran into a group of warehouses a few blocks from his home, and he knew that it would be easier for him to hide that way. Running was no longer an option. His body was struggling to stay focused and conscious, and he knew that the more he ran, the faster the drug – some kind of sedative – would pump through his body and shut him down entirely. Crouched in an alleyway alongside a warehouse building, John fumbled in his pocket for his phone, and felt panic set in again when he dropped it with quivering fingers.

 

He could hear footsteps in the distance: they sounded heavy, fast, and angry, and he knew that it wouldn’t be long before Sebastian Moran caught up to him now. John pulled himself back up into a standing position and checked the safety on his gun. He would kill the man if he had to and if he could, he decided, and that would be the end of it. He thought suddenly about Mary and about what Harry had said – how upset his wife would be if she could see him now, and he willed himself not to break down right then and there.

 

John closed his eyes and tried to suppress the sick feeling in his stomach, and as he did so, he felt a steely, cold hand clamp around his free hand, and when he finally resigned himself to opening them again, he found himself staring into the unmistakable eyes of Sherlock Holmes.

 

John sucked in a ragged, stunned breath. Sherlock stared back at him, taking in the extent of his injuries, and he pressed a silent finger to his lips. John drooped against the wall and did his best to slow and calm his breathing, but his entire body felt as though it was in overdrive and now, Sherlock was standing there very much alive and shock was settling in.

 

Sherlock glanced around the corner of the alleyway out into the street, and then nodded as though making a decision.

 

Still clasping John’s hand, Sherlock turned back to the drugged other man, and whispered simply, “ _Run._ ”

 

The streets beyond the warehouses passed in a flurry of light and sheets of rain, and John willed himself forward for as long as he could. His chest and throat burned and his legs felt as though they were made of rubber, and he lost count of the blocks as they ran before Sherlock was practically carrying him.

 

John remembered the sudden sensation of falling and the sound of Sherlock’s voice calling his name, and after that, everything went dark.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to say a quick "thank you" for all the kudos and kind words about this fic. It's proven quite a challenge (but the good kind), and I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read it. You guys are awesome.

John dreamed of the desert. Back in Afghanistan, there were quiet times, or at least times when they weren’t under heavy fire and the chaos settled into a resigned sort of tension. Usually those times came at night, but John could always remember moments spent waiting under blistering sun with no relief. In his dream, he was standing under what little bit of shade he could find to shield himself from the midday sun. The world around him was suffocating, buildings and Humvees seeming like wavering mirages against the desert heat. He watched a group of schoolchildren kicking around a football not far off. They were used to soldiers and guns by now, and from time to time one of the men would take a minute to kick the football around with them. He watched the children pass the ball back and forth, laughing as they waved the ball in and out of their legs and chased each other down.

 

He blinked once and was lying face down in bloodied dirt, gasping for air as white-hot pain shot through every inch of his body. He reached out for anything he could grasp, and the ringing in his ears was nearly unbearable. He felt the hot stickiness of blood seeping into his uniform, and the sound of agonized screams nearby pierced the constant cacophony in his shell-shocked mind. He reached and grabbed only a handful of dirt with his right hand. He clenched the fistful of bloodied sand and then released it.

 

He felt his heartbeat radiate through him and he gasped for air. He knew this. He remembered it. He uttered a choked cry of pain when he succeeded in rolling himself over onto his back. The sun beat down on him as the world seemed to become quiet and still. The pain intensified, and his stomach turned.

 

_Please, God. Let me live._

 

*                                                                        *                                                                        *

 

John bolted upright in an unfamiliar bed, drenched in sweat and gasping for air. His fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles ached, and he sucked in a breath of fresh air in the darkness of an unknown place. He tried to calm the pounding of his heart against his ribcage, he placed his head in his hands and closed his eyes. Afghanistan was years and thousands of miles behind him, he told himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he had dreamt of the desert, and it left him reeling.

 

He could not tell how long he had been asleep, but it was still dark out and the rain that had been pouring down over London had now grown into a thunderstorm. Wind howled against the nearby window, and occasional flashes of lightning illuminated the night. He glanced around the darkened bedroom and tried to recall everything that had happened, but found that everything was somehow running together in a jumble of fragmented images, words, and sensations. He registered pain to his jaw, and he remembered Sebastian Moran – the man who had called himself Robert McDowell – striking him.

 

He remembered a flash drive in a skull and the empty, terrified look in Kitty Riley’s dead eyes. He could recall the darkness of London side streets and the muddled brightness of headlights as they passed by. And he remembered Sherlock Holmes’s voice, begging him to stay awake, shouting at him to stay focused. His voice seemed like nothing more than an echo, a fading memory, part of a dream that was largely forgotten.

 

John felt a wave of sickness come over him again, and he untangled himself from the twisted sheets. There was a door adjacent to the unfamiliar bedroom and he prayed that it was a bathroom. He flung the door open and didn’t bother with the light switch – he hit his knees hard and retched violently into the toilet. His entire body heaved from the effort, and his heart continued to pound even after the sickness passed. He sat back on the tiled floor of the bathroom, mopping sweat from his brow, and gulped in air so fast that it made his entire body ache.

 

When he at last regained some semblance of composure, he pulled himself to his feet and found the light switch. He looked tired and waterlogged. He put a cautious hand to the injection site, checking it closely. His entire body ached and he could not entirely shake the feeling of lightheadedness that fogged his mind, and he knew that whatever drug he had been given was clinging to him still as best it could.

 

The sound of voices in the distance drew his attention from his reflection, and he instinctively put his hand to the pocket of his coat and felt for a gun. He felt his heart sink when he realized that it was gone. He searched further for the flash drive and sighed with relief when he found it still tucked away.

 

He followed the sound of voices out of the bedroom and out into an ornate hallway. He kept a cautious hand on the wall for support as he had yet to regain his balance entirely, and he came at last to a staircase that led down to the lower level of the home.

 

It took him perhaps a minute to locate the source of the voice, as it was coming from a large study not far from the bottom of the stairs. Sitting in an overstuffed armchair next to the fireplace, looking grave and not entirely happy, was Mycroft Holmes, mobile phone at his ear. John lingered in the doorway for a moment, leaning on the door frame a little for support. Mycroft abruptly ended his call and tucked his phone back into the pocket of his jacket.

 

“Good evening, John,” Mycroft said, his manner polite but cautious as always. “I trust you slept well, what with the unfortunate drugging and attempted murder.”

 

“Yeah, well, you know how it goes,” John said. “If it isn’t one psychopath, it’s another.”

 

Mycroft gave a huff of a laugh, and sighed. “Please, have a seat. I can’t imagine you’re at your best.”

 

John took the chair across from Mycroft. The fire was warm and strangely comforting in spite of everything, and he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment.

 

“I can’t think of too many men to escape from Sebastian Moran with only a couple of bruises,” Mycroft said. “And I can’t imagine he’s too pleased with the result either.”

 

“Since we’re on the topic, here,” John said, digging into the pocket of his coat for the flash drive. “Kitty Riley did some digging into Jim Moriarty, and he cut her tongue out and tortured her to death for her troubles. I think maybe someone with an actual security team should probably hold onto this, because I am _not_ getting my ass kicked again over it.”

 

“Duly noted,” Mycroft said, taking the flash drive from John. “But we both know that’s not what Moran was after.”

 

John didn’t say anything. He couldn’t remember exactly what it was Moran had said to him, nor could he entirely recall what it was Moran had asked him. He remembered only that the man was seemingly disinterested in the information that Kitty Riley had supplied – but what, then? John tried to think back to it, yet something gave him pause. A strange, nagging feeling that he was forgetting something important.

 

“You don’t remember, do you,” Mycroft said. “Moran’s favorite trick is an injection of ketamine – it subdues his victims but still allows them to experience the full extent of his cruelty. If one were to survive, as you clearly have, memory loss is common. What’s the last thing you remember, John?”

 

“I was…running,” John said. “Slashed him across the face and then ran. And then I remember…no. It’s crazy.”

 

“John, I need you to listen to me very carefully,” Mycroft said. “If it were up to me you’d have no involvement at all, for the very reasons you’ve seen tonight. But our enemy has made his move, and that puts all of us in a very awkward position.”

 

“I don’t understand,” John said.

 

Something in Mycroft’s expression changed, and John noticed it. The older Holmes brother gave John a ghost of a smile, and then rose from his seat. He buttoned his jacket, and then looked at John for a moment as though considering carefully what he was about to say.

 

“The battlefield is complicated, John. Any soldier worth his weight attempts to make the right choice even in the most difficult of circumstances,” Mycroft told him. “I can only hope the choices we make now are the right ones.”

 

Without another word, Mycroft was gone, but John was vaguely aware that he wasn’t alone in the room. He waited in silence for the sound of footsteps, but there were none, and he wondered for a single panicked moment if Mycroft was up to something that would leave him in an even more uncomfortable position than he already was. John bolted to his feet and turned, and had he not been gripping the arm of the chair, it was almost certain that his legs would have given out entirely.

 

Sherlock Holmes stood in the doorway of the study, looking every bit the same as John remembered him. For a single second John thought that perhaps he was still dreaming, but something in Sherlock’s eyes – something sad and volatile that he did not entirely understand – told him that it wasn’t a dream.

 

“Hello, John.”

 

The two words hit John like a ton of bricks, and Sherlock took cautious steps into the room as though not entirely sure if he belonged there. John could do little more than stare at the man: the last time he had seen him, Sherlock had been bleeding on the pavement outside St. Bart’s. He remembered little of the minutes that followed, and even less of what happened after that horrible feeling in his gut, and his worst fears, had been confirmed. And now, Sherlock stood before him alive and seemingly healthy, and John felt dizzy all over again.

 

“You were dead.” It was all he could say. “I took your pulse.”

 

“There are plenty of tricks to stopping the pulse in one’s arm,” Sherlock told him. “I assure you, I’m very much alive.”

 

As though in a fog, John reached out and grabbed hold of Sherlock’s arm. At the consulting detective’s wrist he could feel a steady, lively pulse, entirely different from the absence of anything that he had felt outside of Bart’s three years ago. He let his hand drop as he took in the realization that Sherlock Holmes was alive.

 

“Impossible,” John said.

 

“Improbable,” Sherlock corrected, and John knew in that moment that he wasn’t dreaming.

 

John took in this new information and began to let it sink in. He thought back to the days following Sherlock’s death, to the empty flat at Baker Street, to the way Mrs. Hudson had cried. To the way he had cried. And in that moment, a flash of anger ran through him that overpowered any sense of relief he might have had.

 

John clenched his fist. “So you’re alright, then?”

 

“Yes.”

 

John’s fist connected hard with Sherlock’s cheek, and Sherlock staggered back a bit but did not fall. There was an instant flash of guilt within John, but the angry part of him quashed it and he hit Sherlock again, harder this time, and to his surprise, Sherlock didn’t fight back. A bruise was already forming at the consulting detective’s cheek from the two blows, and John swung a third and final time. Sherlock hit the wall and slumped against it as though somehow resigned to John’s assault, and Sherlock wiped a bit of blood from the corner of his lip. John felt another wave of sickness roll through him and his legs suddenly felt unsteady beneath him again – whether it was the drugs or the side effect of shock, he could not be sure.

 

Sherlock steadied himself and touched a hesitant hand to his cheek. He winced when his fingertips brushed the area. “It’s best that you sit, John. You’ve had enough tranquilizers to put down a small family.”

 

“I thought I was hallucinating or something. But it really was you in that alleyway.” John wandered absently back over to the chair he had risen from and plopped down heavily. His mind was newly racing with a thousand questions, and yet he could not find the words to do any of them justice yet. Seeing Sherlock alive was rather like seeing a ghost.

 

“It took three attempts to convince a cabbie that you were a drunken friend of mine,” Sherlock said, sliding down on the chair across from John.

 

“How did you know where I would be, exactly?” John asked.

 

“For all intensive purposes, Mycroft _is_ the British government, remember? Though I’ve absent, I’ve kept myself informed as best I could without revealing myself,” Sherlock said. He fell silent for a moment. “I know that sooner or later, Sebastian Moran would get restless. He’s had his eye on your for a while, I’d wager.”

 

“So you know about Kitty Riley too, then?” John asked.

 

“She was the breaking point,” Sherlock said, “unfortunately for her. She’d been working hard on her next big scoop. Unbeknownst to her, that scoop was in fact everything she needed to clear my name and expose Jim Moriarty, which in itself is irrelevant. But to a man with something to prove who’s already nearing insanity, it was everything. She was a victim of circumstance. A simple matter of the wrong place at the wrong time.”

 

“You didn’t see what he did to her,” John told him, shaking his head. “I don’t call that circumstance.”

 

Sherlock didn’t acknowledge the comment, and continued. “And from that moment, Moran decided to take the next step. The one he’s been waiting for all along – he went after you because he knew that I would intervene if I felt that you were threatened. This was his way of drawing me out and confirming I was back in London.”

 

“Back in London,” John repeated. “Where the hell have you been?”

 

“Everywhere,” Sherlock said. “Throw a dart at a map, and I’ve seen the city underneath. Moriarty’s web is extensive and spans the whole of the world, and it’s taken three years to track all of them down. All except Sebastian Moran.”

 

“Before tonight I’d never even heard that name.”

 

“And before a murderous cabbie I’d never heard the name Moriarty,” Sherlock said, clasping his hands together and resting them against his lips as though deep in thought for a moment. “Even a man like Moriarty needed someone to put his plans into action. To inspire fear. Someone to trust, in his own way.”

 

“And I let that psychopath into my home and served him tea,” John said, trying to shake away the dizzy feeling that still pervaded.

 

Sherlock’s smile was grim. “At least you had no idea who you were dealing with.”

 

“And what is it we’re dealing with, exactly?” John asked.

 

“The most dangerous man in London, currently,” Sherlock said. “He’s only the pretender to the throne, but without Moriarty’s guidance and a group of followers at his back, he’s slipping. He has all the restraint of a rabid dog, and there’s no one left to hold his leash. Tonight was his way of confirming that I’m alive and that I’m here in England.”

 

“And he’s out to kill you,” John muttered. “Charming.”

 

“No, it’s deeper than that,” Sherlock said. “He doesn’t just want to kill me. That would be too easy. He wants me to suffer for what he thinks I’ve done. In his mind, I’m responsible for Moriarty. And he won’t stop until he catches up to me. He’s scoured the world looking, and I’ve remained a step ahead as best I could. Until tonight, that is.”

 

Silence fell between them, and John was at a loss. He was still struggling to beat back the grogginess that came from the drugs administered to him. Combined with the revelation that Sherlock was alive, it was almost more than he could bear at once. Sherlock reached into his coat pocket and produced a cigarette. He lit it, took a long drag, and exhaled into the air.

 

“You still have questions,” Sherlock said. “About how I did it.”

 

“We’ll start with that, yeah,” John said. “You were dead. Very, very dead.”

 

“Falling is like flying, only with a more permanent destination,” Sherlock muttered. “You saw me fall. And you saw me lying there. But you didn’t see me hit the ground, did you.”

 

“No,” John said. “But there was blood…”

 

“Easily obtained at a hospital,” Sherlock said, waving a dismissive hand.

 

“Your pulse,” John countered.

 

“A tennis ball placed under the armpit gives the illusion of no pulse when checked at wrist,” Sherlock said. “All that was left were the legal bits and pieces and, quite literally, playing dead. Which is done easily enough with friends in the right places.”

 

“Molly,” John muttered. “You can’t be serious.”

 

“I knew I could trust her,” Sherlock said. “And she proved her worth.”

 

“I’ve worked alongside that woman for three years, Sherlock,” John said. “And she knew you were alive and didn’t bother to tell me. Mycroft either. Am I the only person who didn’t have any idea what was going on?”

 

“Of course not,” Sherlock told him, taking another drag from his cigarette. “Mrs. Hudson was rather alarmed to find me on her doorstep this evening.”

 

“Oh, good. So glad that me and the landlady were left the in the dark,” John muttered. “In the meantime I’m running from the police and inviting psychopaths in for tea.”

 

Sherlock checked his watch and rose from his seat. “Moran visited you nearly four hours ago. He’s had time to find a hiding place within the city. By this point he knows that I’m following him. The tracker becomes the tracked, and when a man like Moran feels trapped, he’ll do whatever he has to in order to go unnoticed. His number of allies has dwindled practically to none. So where would he go?”

 

“He’s going to need medical attention, wherever he is,” John pointed out. “May have sliced him up a bit before he managed to drug me.”

 

A thin smile crept onto Sherlock’s lips. “He won’t go to a hospital. But he’s just mad enough to either fix himself up or bully someone familiar into it. Considering he killed one of his only acquaintances left in order to pique your interest, that narrows the list considerably.”

 

“So where does that leave him?”

 

“I know where he’ll be,” Sherlock said. “Or where he’ll have been. If we’re very, very lucky, he may even have left the poor woman alive once the shock of injury set in.”

 

Sherlock didn’t waste any more time, and headed for the doorway. John sat there taking everything in, but his brain always halted when it came rocketing back to the realization that Sherlock was alive. That Sherlock had been alive for three years. That Mycroft Holmes and Molly Hooper had known but not said anything, and after a moment, John came to a silent realization: Mycroft had not come to the funeral parlor that night of his own accord. Much as Molly hadn’t kept so close an eye on him solely out of care and friendship.

 

When John turned back to the doorway, he saw that Sherlock had already gone, and in spite of his anger and his shock, he felt his heart sink a bit. He closed his eyes and leaned back in the overstuffed armchair and tried to calm his still pounding heart, but to no avail. His throat was dry and his head pounded from injury and from the weight of all of this new information, and he wondered if he could sleep after all that.

 

“Just to be clear,” Sherlock said, and John jumped at the sound of his voice. “Sebastian Moran doesn’t play by Moriarty’s rules or by anyone else’s. We’re talking about a man who would tie a child to a tree and leave him as bait if it meant a good hunt. The world’s most profitable serial killer, and I intend to hunt him down.”

 

“Why are you telling me this, exactly?” John asked.

 

The detective strode back to where John had been sitting, and reached into the pocket of his coat. He produced a handgun, new and unfamiliar, and held it out to John. “Because in my experience, work is the best antidote for misery. You’ve had your fair share – misery, blood, violence, and all that. But I’ll ask you once more, and only once, if you’d like to see just a little bit more.”

 

John hesitated for a moment. He thought back to the past three years: to the tedium of work, the joy of marriage, the blind monotony of grief. To bills and to lectures and to selecting a casket, to talking to graves filled by people he cared about. Lunches with co-workers and with his sister, forced smiles, quiet moments with Mary when she would come home from work with finger paint on her cheek that she didn’t notice. The sensation of gravestones under fingertips, and the empty feeling in one’s stomach that came in the moments after someone died.

 

John took the handgun, and rose from his chair. “I need to make a stop by my flat first.”

 

The cab ride was silent. Sherlock occupied himself by watching London pass by through the window – it was very late at night and the city was largely sleeping. The rolling thunder and sheets of rain that had churned in a whirlwind about the streets had passed, leaving only the occasional rumbles in the distance and slickened streets behind. Streetlights reflected in large puddles as the cab splashed through him.

 

When they arrived at the flat, John saw that the door to the house was hanging open. He climbed out of the cab and stood there for a moment taking in the sight, and there was for the first time a growing sense of dread in him that hadn’t occurred to him when he first realized that he needed a change of clothes. He was covered in mud, soaked with rain, and was fairly certain Moran’s blood was coating the sleeve of his jacket, and it had seemed only logical to return home before going off on a chase.

 

Sherlock didn’t speak when the two of them entered the home, and John went numb all over again when he surveyed the living room. Moran had ransacked the flat in a frenzy of bloodied rage and frustration – the furniture was overturned, bookshelves toppled. The door that led out to the back yard hung open and was smeared with blood. Muddy tracks dragged along the carpet – John recognized his own footprints among them.

 

Moran had smashed out the windows and let rain and wind have their turn with the contents of the home as well. Pictures that Mary’s students had drawn that she had hung on the walls lay tattered and soaked on the carpet. Broken glass littered the room. John opened his mouth to say something and fell silent again when he realized that Moran had left a message.

 

Scrawled onto the wall above the television – smeared there with his fingertips and presumably using his own blood – Sebastian Moran had written simply, _Get Sherlock._

 

His eyes fell to a picture frame lying face down among the wreckage of one of the bookshelves. Without a word, he wandered blindly over to it and picked it up. He swallowed and did not react when he saw that it was the picture that Mary had kept her in her hospital room into the night she died. The frame was smashed into dozens of pieces, and John felt his stomach turn when he realized that Moran had purposefully smeared blood across Mary’s face in the picture. He stared at it for a long while, trying to wrap his mind around it, and he clutched what was left of the frame with white-knuckles.

 

“John.” Sherlock’s voice drew him back to the reality of the chaos that had formerly been his home. Sherlock was standing near the front door, and even after three years, John could see the wheels in the other man’s head already turning, surveying the scene – and the home – and absorbing every detail of it, preserving it, storing it.

 

“Right. Yeah. Give me just a minute,” John said, hesitantly sitting the broken photograph down on the coffee table and letting his fingers linger on it for a moment. He went to climb the stairs up to the bedroom, and it was all he could do to keep himself steady as he walked.

 

“He did it to terrorize you,” Sherlock said, and John paused at the words. “Moriarty thrived on power; Moran thrives on fear. You drew blood, and in his mind, that makes you a target. He doesn’t take losing well.”

 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” John muttered, and he climbed the stairs without another word on the matter.

 

The devastation Moran had brought to the flat was limited to the first floor, and John breathed a sigh of relief when he realized that the bedroom was left untouched. The room smelled like the comforts of home that he had grown used to – fabric softener. The faintest hints of lemon from whatever room spray Mary had favored. For a moment, John wanted nothing more than to curl up on his side of the bed and sleep. The ketamine was still gradually working its way out of his system, but more than that, there was the shock of Sherlock Holmes. The fear of being in danger. The damage to the home that he and his wife had made.

 

John sat down on the edge of the bed and breathed in deeply. There were times when it grew quiet enough that he could still almost feel Mary’s presence there. He didn’t believe in spirits or the afterlife or any of that, and yet she had been such a force in his life that part of him liked to believe that she was still there in some form. There had been many nights when she had found him like this, seated on the edge of the bed, exhausted and overwhelmed, and she would always coax him into lying down. John’s lip quivered slightly at the memory of how she would wrap him up in her arms as best she could (insisting on being “the big spoon”) and bury her face in his neck, until at last that tightly coiled anger knotted in his chest would dissipate and he would be alright again.

 

John pushed all of that away and fetched fresh clothes from the closet. He went into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. The fluorescent lights hurt his eyes, and they watered a bit as they adjusted to the jarring light. He changed clothes and winced as he felt the beginnings of bruises from Moran slamming him back against the fence. Closer examination revealed the yellowish beginnings of a bruise to his cheek and a split toward the corner of his lip. He cleaned himself up as best he could in a hurry, scrubbing his hands and face clean of mud and blood and whatever else he had come upon during the night, and stared at himself in the mirror. He closed his eyes, breathed out, opened his eyes again.

 

The single punch he delivered to the bathroom mirror sent it cracking in a spider web pattern. Pain rocketed through John’s left hand as he pulled his fist back to examine it. His knuckles were red but barely bleeding, and he rinsed them in the sink where some small pieces of glass had fallen. He dabbed the remaining blood away with a paper towel, threw the towel into the nearby trashcan, and went back downstairs.


	7. Chapter 7

Back in the cab again, silence pervaded. John did his best to conceal his newly wounded knuckles, and couldn’t be sure if Sherlock noticed them. The consulting detective had said not a word since John reappeared in the downstairs area of the flat, and had stood silently by while John closed and locked the back and front doors to the home. It seemed trivial, John realized, considering the broken windows and destruction that Moran had already inflicted, but it was the least he could do.

 

It was late now, and traffic was sparse in London. The storm from earlier had passed and had left a low hanging, gloomy fog over most of the city, rolling over the river and misting on the front windshield of their cab. John tried his best to sit still, but found that his shoulder throbbed with a dull ache that was all too familiar. He hoped that it was the result of his earlier fight with Moran, and nothing more: his mind told him otherwise, and he tried not to think about it.

 

The cabbie drove until they entered an upscale suburban area of the city with which John was unfamiliar. There were only hours left until daybreak and it was, at the very least, an unusual time for a house call, and yet Sherlock seemed unfazed by the time. As the two men made their way up the front steps of a neatly kept and upscale home not far from the end of the block, John wondered if Sherlock even really knew what time it was anymore.

 

“What are we even doing here?” John muttered, trying to keep his voice low.

 

“A wounded man goes to a hospital,” Sherlock said, seemingly fixated for a moment on the bottom of the front door. “A wounded criminal goes to someone who owes him a favor. Someone afraid enough of him that she can’t tell him ‘no’ for fear of what he might do. He’s no Moriarty, but he learned enough of his tricks to pull all the right strings when they work to his advantage.”

 

Without another word on the matter, Sherlock rapped sharply on the door. John was ever mindful of the handgun in his pocket. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this queasy sort of nervousness permeating him, and he wondered if it was a matter of the ketamine working its way out of his system or something else entirely. A moment later, a light came on inside the house, and the door opened to reveal a woman in her early forties on the other side, wrapped in her dressing gown and looking sleepy and confused.

 

“Can I help you?” She looked at both of them expectantly, but John could already see the questioning look in her eyes.

 

“May we come in? Yes? Good,” Sherlock said, pushing the woman rather abruptly out of his way. John stood there on the front steps for a moment, taken aback by the rather impatient and aggressive motion. Sherlock had always excelled at feigning propriety and kindness when it suited him, and to see him so comfortably push his way into a woman’s home came as a bit of a shock. John shook away the feeling of unease and followed Sherlock inside.

 

“You can’t just barge into my home,” the woman said, slamming the door shut behind her. “I have rights and you’re bloody well not the police.”

 

“Obviously,” Sherlock said. “A reasonable person – especially one of your status and intelligence – might have asked who we were, and to see our credentials. But then, I find it perfectly reasonable that you already know who I am, and why I’m here, so we can skip the formalities if you’d like.”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him, and John saw that she didn’t come any closer when Sherlock flopped down rather comfortably on her sofa, as though he was visiting an old friend. John preferred to remain standing.

 

“Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps this is the most unexciting home invasion in the England’s history,” Sherlock said. He pulled his mobile phone from the pocket of his coat, and began dialing a number. “This should be interesting – I do appreciate dramatic police arrivals.”

 

“What are you doing?” The mystery woman’s voice became shrill now, and John saw the shift in her from confusion and hesitation to one of outright fear.

 

“Calling the police,” Sherlock said, looking at with what John guessed was a mixture of contempt and amusement. “It’s what any responsible citizen would do in the event of a housebreaking, wouldn’t you say? A widow living alone, unprotected, with two male intruders? At least one of whom is armed? Or should I leave that part out until the officers arrive? It’s really your choice.”

 

“Tell me what it is you want from me, and then get the hell out of my house,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

 

“Sebastian Moran,” Sherlock said. “You served in Iraq with him once. You conducted his psychological evaluations and served as a medic for your company. You were at least partially responsible for his discharge from the military, were you not, Doctor Parker?”

 

The woman in question stared at Sherlock for a long while and didn’t say anything, and then turned with a wearied expression to John. She lingered on him for a moment before turning back to Sherlock.

 

“I hardly see what that has to do with anything,” she said.

 

“Four years ago, you reached out to the very man you sent home from desert for help. Well, Moran and his new friends, that is,” Sherlock said. “An abusive husband and a hefty insurance policy were great motivators, but you knew that any detective with half a brain would immediately suspect you. And so you asked Jim Moriarty to fix it for you. To make your troubles all go away. And up until the minute you received the phone call, you thought perhaps it was some kind of joke, didn’t you.”

 

“I’m not some idiot you can talk into agreeing to any such claim,” Doctor Parker told him.

“No, but you’re exactly the kind of idiot who was desperate enough to make a deal with the devil, even though you knew exactly who and what it was you were dealing with,” Sherlock told her. “You knew Sebastian Moran’s record and you were still willing to contact him to get rid of the late Mr. Parker.”

 

“I have money, if that’s what you’re after.”

 

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Don’t waste my time. You’ve seen Sebastian Moran, and you’ve seen him tonight.”

 

“I haven’t seen that man in four years,” Doctor Parker said.

 

“Lie to me again, and I _will_ call the police and tell them everything I know,” Sherlock said. “You’ll go away on murder charges, and I can tell from looking at you that prison wouldn’t suit you. If you tell me the truth, I’ll walk out of this house and never come back. Now let’s try this again – Sebastian Moran.”

 

“There’s a rule about contact through the proper channels,” Doctor Parker said, sliding down in an armchair across from the sofa. “No one speaks to the man at the top. Colonel Moran respected that chain of command. I hired him four years ago to kill my husband so that I could collect on his insurance – you know that already. But trust me when I say that he was a bastard and that he had it coming.”

 

“And when is the last time you saw Moran, exactly?” John asked, speaking for the first time since arriving at the home. He had begun to piece together what Sherlock was getting at now, and it was beginning to make sense.

 

“Years,” Doctor Parker said.

 

Sherlock rolled his eyes at the lie. “Perhaps you’re afraid of him, and that’s understandable. But panic and deception aren’t exactly good bedfellows. There are traces of mud leading up to your front steps – Colonel Moran would have been covered in it. The carpet between the front door and the entryway to the kitchen has been cleaned, and quite recently, at that. I can still smell the chemicals. You’re in your dressing gown and took your time getting downstairs, giving us the impression that you’ve been sleeping. But you have talcum powder just there, on your wrist, and I can’t imagine anyone who sleeps in surgical gloves. Sebastian Moran was here, and he was here tonight: he came to you injured, and you helped him because you had no other choice, am I right?”

 

“He said you’d know he’d been here,” Doctor Parker told him.

 

Sherlock nodded and closed his eyes for a moment. “Then this next part is perhaps the most important of all, and believe me when I say that I’m in no mood to be lied to again. I can’t imagine he would have told you – but if there’s ever been anyone allowed a glimpse into his mind, it’s you. I need to know where he would hide if he felt threatened.”

 

Doctor Parker rose from her chair and went to the nearby liquor cabinet. Though it was just past four in the morning, she poured herself a drink. Her hands shook and the sound of glass rattling together echoed through the living room of the flat. She took a long drink from her glass and settled back into her chair.

 

“You know as well as I do, Mister Holmes, that he’d kill me if I tell you anything even if I had something to offer,” she said.

 

“And if you choose not to help me, then I can just as quickly call the police and unravel everything you’ve worked so hard to gain. One way or another, you’re making the decision to end your life tonight. It’s only a question of whether you’re still breathing or not when the dust settles,” Sherlock said.

 

John gaped at the words. The look in Doctor Parker’s eyes was one of abject horror, and in turn Sherlock was as calm as though he was discussing the weather. His former flat mate had never been one for sentiment or for polite behavior when it didn’t work to his advantage, but there was something cold in Sherlock’s manner that he couldn’t remember being there before. It was almost as though he was taking some secret degree of enjoyment from this woman’s confusion and her fear. John wondered if he sympathized with her too much given that she had essentially murdered her husband, but yet it was Sherlock who was proving more unsettling than anything else. The consulting detective’s eyes never left the shaken woman.

 

“Men like Sebastian Moran are a special priority for the military,” Doctor Parker said, taking another swig from her glass. “Those involved in special operations and the like, they require a certain amount of extra attention. They walk in parts of the world our country isn’t supposed to be in. Some men come into war with hope in their eyes and come out empty. Sebastian Moran went in already dead.”

 

“Meaning?” Sherlock asked.

 

“He grew up hunting with his father, and he prided himself on being able to track an animal. The bigger the game, the more satisfaction he took from it, until one day, boars and tigers weren’t enough anymore,” Doctor Parker said. “But in the meantime he learned something much more valuable – how to fit in. How to pretend to be like everyone else. But the minute he was put into a position to take actual human lives, it became a new kind of big game hunt for him. He’s killed hundreds, and he’s proud of it.”

 

John remembered war: he remembered all too well the feeling that came immediately after killing a man, a sick and staggering shock that rolled throughout his entire body. His own eyes demanding that he look at what he had done and acknowledge it because, though they were enemies, they were also human beings. He remembered the first time he had ever killed a man because he hadn’t slept that night: instead he thought of the young man. Someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s husband, and he had taken him away – he had not only killed the man, but he had snuffed out everything the man might ever have become in three seconds and a single firing of an assault rifle. He had seen similar looks of realization in the eyes of the other men in his unit as the fighting intensified. Eventually, killing had been a necessity, an act of survival. It had never and would never be a game.

 

“He would burn a village if it meant not being bored,” Doctor Parker said. “In the end, it was recommended that he undergo evaluation. Some of his superiors believed that he was unfit for duty. That perhaps the war took far too great a toll on him.”

 

“But you didn’t believe that,” John said.

 

Doctor Parker looked at him. “You’ve been to war, Doctor Watson. You’re like me – you were a soldier and a doctor. Those men over there, they trusted you with their lives. If one among them had been a danger, you would have done the same thing.”

 

“So you evaluated him,” Sherlock said. “What did you find?”

 

“Do either of you believe in the concept of the soul?” Doctor Parker asked.

 

“I think you know my answer,” Sherlock told her.

 

“Some might suggest that men are born hard wired to become exactly who they’re going to be,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Others would point to environment as an influence. From what I can tell, Sebastian Moran had a normal, happy childhood in a two-parent, fairly affluent home. But something in him took too much pleasure in the hunt. He was always so calm, and so polite – he couldn’t tolerate rudeness. I remember the day he came in for his evaluation, one of the men made a vulgar remark about me. He was furious, and forced the young man to apologize.”

 

“What did he do, then, that warranted a superior’s concern?” John asked. He didn’t talk about it – not with Mary, not with anyone – but war changed people. Losing friends and seeing what human beings were truly capable of doing to each other made people hardened, made them react more calmly to things that would send a civilian fleeing in terror, and so he knew that whatever Sebastian had done, it had been alarming enough to warrant the extra attention.

 

“There was a roadside ambush outside Baghdad,” Parker said, shaking her head. “Heavy losses. Very violent. Colonel Moran intervened, and saved several of our soldiers. But that wasn’t what alarmed others. There was one insurgent, one young man, who was badly wounded and left alone to die. Moran could have made any number of choices – he might even have shown mercy. Instead, he watched from a hillside as a terrified young man dragged himself nearly a kilometer, bleeding and screaming, before he shot him. His orders were not to fire on the boy…five soldiers watched Sebastian Moran enjoy this boy’s suffering before putting him out of his misery.”

 

“And so he was discharged, obviously,” John said.

 

“He was a decorated officer, and something so severe on his record might have impeded his adjustment back to normal life,” Doctor Parker said. “And so the incident was brushed under the rug – said they wanted to give him a ‘fighting chance.’”

 

“By that time he’d already caught the attention of someone who could appreciate his talents,” Sherlock said. “Someone with not only an offer of a fighting chance, but with an opportunity to profit from his talents.”

 

“I can’t pretend to guess what brought him to where he is,” Parker told them, “but he was who he was before he ever put on a uniform.”

 

“Where can I find him?” Sherlock asked.

 

Doctor Parker considered the question, smiled grimly. “Part of being a good huntsman is knowing how to remain unseen. I know who you are, and the things you’ve done, and you’ve spent years tracking him. He has no intention of making it easy for you, even now.”

 

“Then why intervene at all? I don’t understand,” John said.

 

“Because he was bored,” Sherlock muttered. “Three years is a long time waiting. He suspected that I was alive and he knew that with the right amount of pressure, I would respond in turn. Staying hidden became too easy. Too passive.”

 

“He said it was time to end the story,” Doctor Parker said. “One way or another. He didn’t tell me anything, and I sure as hell didn’t ask any questions. I stitched him up, and then got him out of here as quickly as I could. I paid my price for what I did.”

 

“But you knew that if you said no, he’d kill you without a second glance,” Sherlock said.

 

“You’re Sherlock Holmes. You know if I’m lying to you, right?” she asked. “Then trust me when I say that I don’t know where you’ll find him. I’ve told you everything I know.”

 

John studied Sherlock as the other man searched Doctor Parker’s eyes for any trace of deception. Despite her shakiness and her early attempts to lie to them, she seemed reasonably calm compared to what she had been before.

 

“Alright, then,” Sherlock said finally, rising from his seat on the sofa. “I doubt he’ll come after you; you were more or less useless regarding any current information, which is his top concern. But if nothing else you’ve confirmed my suspicions about what I’m dealing with. I would say thank you, but under the circumstances, that would be a stretch.”

 

“Are you going to call the police?” she asked him, glancing up at him with fear in her eyes.

 

Sherlock stared at her as though somehow disgusted, and John could almost feel the consulting detective’s contempt. He did not answer her – he still held his mobile phone in his hand, and he glanced down at it and then back to the frightened woman sitting in the chair. Wordlessly, he tucked the phone back into his pocket, brushed past John, and went for the door.

 

John caught up to him half a block down the street as he headed back toward a busier road. It was late and the rain had made the air into a thick blanket of fog that hunkered down over the city streets. Though it was still dark out, dawn couldn’t be too terribly far off. Already a few early rising birds chirped somewhere in the distance. Sherlock didn’t slow his pace when John caught up to him.

 

“Well?” John asked, barely managing to keep up with the other man. His body was ragged with exhaustion despite his drug-induced sleep earlier in the night.

 

“Well what?” Sherlock asked.

 

“Are you going to call the police? She did conspire to have her husband murdered,” John said. “Not to mention she’d likely be safer in police custody than she would sitting at home where Moran can find her.”

 

“She’s perfectly fine where she is, and right now, she’s not my problem,” Sherlock said. “It’s unlikely that he’ll come for her, as I said. And a murder for insurance case is the last thing on my mind.”

 

“And what if he decides to go back and get rid of her? I’ve met him, Sherlock. He’s out of his mind. You didn’t see what he did to Kitty Riley. I did,” John told him.

 

“Then you take care of it, since you’re so concerned with it,” Sherlock told him, something cold creeping into his voice. “I don’t have time to save the dregs of London from themselves. I’ve spent three years looking for Moran and I’m _this close_ , John. I haven’t got time for side projects and diversions.”

 

“And it didn’t occur to you that maybe that’s exactly what he wants? You, out and about in London again?” John asked.

 

“Oh, I’m sure that’s exactly what he wants,” Sherlock said, stopping at a corner on one of the main roads. Traffic was thin and sparse because of the fog, but he knew that a cab would be along before long. “I drew too much attention to myself once before; that’s exactly what he’s counting on now. He knew that if he went after you, I would intervene if I thought you were in any real danger. Now, you’re out of danger.”

 

“Meaning?” John stood there, dumbfounded.

 

“Part of letting the world believe you’re dead is being invisible,” Sherlock said. “I risked enough tonight in letting you come here. The more information you know, the more risk is involved for you. The board is set, and all the pieces are moving. It’s only a matter of who bests the other first now. And I’m sorry, John. I really am. But I know how this ends, and I’m not putting you in the middle of it.”

 

“…you’re telling me to stay out of this.”

 

“Well deduced,” Sherlock said. A cab was approaching in the distance, and Sherlock looked John in the eye for the first time since leaving Doctor Parker’s flat. “The less you know, the better you and everyone you care about will be.”

 

“So what, I just pretend that I don’t know that you’re alive, and that none of tonight ever happened?” John asked.

 

Sherlock sighed, and motioned to draw the cab’s attention. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. I’ve fought too hard and too long to keep you – and everyone else – safe. I’m not going to lose sight of that now. I got you out of a dangerous situation tonight. Take care not to put yourself back into one again.”

 

“He knows where I live,” John said.

 

“He won’t be so obvious,” Sherlock told him. “To Moran, you’re just collateral damage. He has confirmation that I’m not only alive, but back in London, which makes him more dangerous than ever.”

 

“So what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” John asked.

 

“The same thing you’ve done all along. Go to work. Take lunches with Stamford. Do your paperwork. Go about your life as though I don’t exist,” Sherlock told him. The cab came to a halt at the curb, and Sherlock made a quick move to open the door.

 

“And what if I refuse?” John asked. He was angry all over again, but this time, it ran much deeper than punching Sherlock out of shock and cold realization. He had only hours ago discovered that his best friend was alive and now, Sherlock was telling him to pretend that none of it had happened.

 

“As far as the world is concerned, I’m a dead man,” Sherlock said. “I’d prefer to keep it that way. Now forget me, John. And go home.”

 

Without another word, Sherlock climbed into the back seat of the cab, and before John could come up with any kind of reply, the taxi was moving again, leaving him standing on the sidewalk, dumbfounded and at a loss. He stood there on the street corner until the taillights of the taxi disappeared off into the distance, and he closed his eyes for a moment and tried to piece together what his next move would be.

 

The sky was beginning to grow lighter by the time he made it to Harry’s flat, and he considered for a long while what he might say to his sister to somehow make up for their argument. He thought of a thousand different ways to say he was sorry, ranging from admitting that she was right (which he preferred not to do) to offering to let her punch him in the gut (which was the lesser of two evils). The elevator ride to Harry’s floor felt like it lasted an eternity, and John leaned back against the wall of it and took deep breaths.

 

Harriet Watson was not an especially observant woman in general. She tended to take things at face value and not dig too much deeper unless she was busy calling someone on something they had done. But at the same time, John couldn’t think of anyone in his life who had known him for as long as his sister had and whether he wanted to admit it or not, she cared about him, and at least on some levels, she knew him.

 

When Harry answered the door, it was all John could do not to fall apart. She looked sleepy and confused when she saw him standing there, and he could see her eyes go wide when she saw the bruises on his face and took in the sight of his bashed in knuckles. For a moment, he almost considered telling her the truth: that Sherlock was alive and back in London. That the past three years had been steeped in lies and in plans that he didn’t understand. That he had spent time among people who knew the secret and had watched him go through the motions of grief without ever saying a word.

 

Yet he knew better. To involve Harry would only put her in harm’s way, and he refused to do it.

 

“John, what’s happened to you?” Harry asked, unable to come up with a more clever way to say it.

 

“I, um…I need a place to stay for a few days,” he said. “You were right about that case. It was bad news, and I need somewhere safe.”

 

Harry didn’t yell at him, nor did she point out that she had been right, and John was grateful. Instead, she opened the door wider to let him in.

 

“Are you alright?” she asked.

 

“I’ll live,” John told her. “I just need to sleep.”

 

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she told him, and it took every ounce of whatever energy John had left not to laugh at her remark.

 


	8. Chapter 8

John spent four days at his sister’s flat before finding the willpower to return to his own home and to the chaos that Sebastian Moran had brought to it. When he had initially unlocked the door and stepped inside, a knot of dread had twisted in his stomach as though everything in him warned against going back inside. The feeling of violation that came with Moran’s handiwork was still fresh in his mind, but he had pushed it aside and told himself that he would be damned if he was going to let some madman run him out of his own home.

 

He went to work and went through the motions as he had before. He stitched people up and brought them back to health. He broke bad news to grieving, screaming families in too-quiet waiting rooms. He filled out paperwork, took lunches with Mike Stamford, and even filled in for a Gross Anatomy class one evening when Stamford had been summoned for a prior engagement.

 

It had nearly a week since Sherlock Holmes had resurfaced and just as quickly disappeared, and John set out on the following Saturday with the task of restoring some sort of order to his home. He first went to work cleaning up the broken glass that littered the living room and the kitchen. The windows in the living room were left gaping, and so he temporarily covered with plastic sheeting until he could call someone to do the proper repairs.

 

He swept up the glass shards and put them in the bins outside, and vacuumed over their tiny remnants on the carpet. He picked up books – Mary’s books – and put them back on their places, arranged alphabetically, on the shelves. He paused to make sure that the pressed four-leaf clover she had found on their honeymoon still rested in the middle of a well-worn copy of _The Sun Also Rises,_ which had been her favorite. He gathered what he could of her former students’ artwork and laid it in a stack on the coffee table, unsure what to do with it.

 

John retrieved the broken photograph from one of the bookshelves. He broke the print free of its frame and knew already that the photo was destroyed, but he still stood there holding it in his hands and staring at it for a long while. Staring at Mary’s smiling face, now smeared and stained with the blood of a stranger with a vendetta. John felt his hand tremor slightly when he thought of what Mary would say if she saw their home like this, broken and bloodied, and he felt sick. It took everything he had to throw the photo away.

 

He scrubbed at the blood that had soaked into the floor for what seemed like hours, spraying peroxide and water onto the trail of blood along the carpet and scrubbing until his arms were nearly numb. By the time he reached the door, he was sweating and exhausted, but determined to continue all the same. He put everything that wasn’t broken back into place in the kitchen. He picked up the teacups that he and Moran had left in the living room, washed them both, and calmly put them back into the cabinet.

 

He left the bloody writing on the wall for last, filling up a bucket with soap and water after pushing the TV and its stand aside. He began scrubbing at the stains furiously, even though his arms were already tired from the earlier effort of cleaning the carpet. The work of cleaning the house – much like the work at Bart’s – kept his brain just occupied enough without really putting it to work, which made it comforting whether he fully understood it or not.

 

A knock came at the door, and John froze. He had left the gun on the coffee table this time, unwilling to make the same mistake he had before, and he paused long enough to take off the heavy rubber gloves on his hands before tucking the gun into the waist of his jeans and going to the door.

 

Molly Hooper waited on the other side, purse slung over her shoulder, smile on her face as it usually was.

 

“Hi.” John didn’t know what else to say to her.

 

“This isn’t a bad time, is it?” she asked, glancing him over. He knew he must have looked terrible after hours of work without much rest, and he could see a flash of worry in her eyes that she quashed every bit as quickly as it appeared: she was exceptionally good at that, he realized.

 

“Just cleaning house a bit,” John said.

 

“Can I come in?” she asked.

 

He didn’t respond outright, and instead opened the door to let her in and went back to the living room. He placed the gun back on the coffee table and grabbed the safety gloves back from the edge of the bucket, and immediately went back to work scrubbing the blood from the walls. He was less than halfway finished, and he could see Molly standing uncomfortably near an armchair taking in the sight of what he was doing.

 

“I’d offer you tea, but as you can see, I’m a little busy at the moment,” John told her. “Blood is a little harder to get off of walls than it looks. But I imagine you already know that, don’t you. And let’s not mention the carpet. _That_ was fun.”

 

“I had a coffee before I stopped over. You haven’t been answering my texts,” Molly told him, seemingly ignoring his comments about the blood. She sat her purse down on the sofa and slid down alongside it, and folded her hands awkwardly in her lap.

 

“Been busy.”

 

He knew without turning around that she was staring at the writing on the wall. “What exactly happened here, John?”

 

John let out a bitter chuckle. “One sorry mistake after another, that’s what.”

 

“I’m sorry?”

 

“Well,” John said, scrubbing harder at the bloodied words on the walls and at the pink foam of bloodied soap it produced, “let’s start with me taking a look at a murder case after some random man approached me in a diner, only it turns out he’s an old friend of the dearly departed Moriarty who also happens to be responsible for Kitty Riley.”

 

“You know who killed her, and you haven’t gone to the police? I don’t understand,” she said.

 

“Me neither,” John replied. “It’s like he doesn’t bloody exist unless he’s right there in front of you. He came into my home and he attacked me and tore this place apart. And, as you can clearly see, he left me a message that’s turning out to be a real bitch to get off of my wall.”

 

“Is that…your blood?” Molly asked, and he heard the alarmed tremor in her voice.

 

John scrubbed even harder at the stains, and tried to calm the ever-increasing pounding in his ribcage and the cold, stabbing feeling of anger festering in the pit of his stomach. “Actually, it’s his. I managed cut him up a bit before I barely made it out of here at all.”

 

“Why would he come after you, though?”

 

John stopped scrubbing, and knew that he had officially arrived at the end of his patience with this line of questioning. He dropped the bloodied sponge back into its bucket and turned to Molly. When their eyes met, there was no attempt on Molly’s part to lie: she was by no means a stupid woman. There were times when John suspected that perhaps she saw and noticed far more than she ever let on because speaking up wasn’t in her nature. The look on her face alone told John everything he needed to know: that Sherlock had been telling the truth about Molly being a part of his “death.”

 

“And now, we come to my favorite part of the story, where oh, by the way, Sherlock is alive. That he’s alive and you _knew_ the entire time,” John said. He tried to take deep breaths to keep himself from getting angry: his therapist had suggested it years ago, and it currently was doing next to nothing.

 

Molly’s expression changed at the words, and John could not entirely comprehend the shift in her eyes. She had gone from cheerfully alarmed to something entirely different. Her smile faded and she looked down at her hands, and then nodded as though resigning herself to something. She took a deep breath and looked John in the eye once again.

 

“Would you believe me if I told you that it was for the best?” she asked.

 

“I don’t know, Molly. You’ve lied to me for three years. And you’re not the only one, it turns out, so I’m having a little bit of trouble believing a single word anyone says just now,” John told her. “In the three years we’ve worked together, it never once crossed your mind to tell me?”

 

“Of course it did,” Molly told him. “If it were up to me, I would have said something. But he made me promise not to say a word, no matter what happened.”

 

“Why you?” John asked, and he regretted the words as soon as they escaped his lips.

 

To his surprise, Molly smiled, and there was a mixture of sadness and sympathy in her eyes that he found that he could barely stand at the moment. “I asked him that myself. I know I’m not…I’m not part of his world. I’m not someone he gives much consideration to. And I think that was the reason, to be honest. He knew that I would protect his secret, and do what I had to in order to let everyone believe the lie. But I was just far enough removed from him that no one would question me.”

 

“Three years, Molly,” John repeated. “You sat on that little bit of information every day. All those lunches, every time we went for coffee, all those times you visited my dying wife, and you never said a word.”

 

“I made a promise, and I intended to keep it,” Molly said. “You can’t think it was easy for me, either. All those times you came to work with that look in your eyes. All those things the papers said and I knew everything and couldn’t say a word.”

 

John shook his head tried to take in this information. All the hours he had spent in the morgue having coffee with Molly. Lunches spent laughing about squeamish medical residents. The times she had gone shopping with Mary. The night she had gone up to the roof looking for him when Mary died. All that time, she had known that Sherlock Holmes was out there in the world somewhere alive, and couldn’t be bothered to tell him. John could scarcely wrap his mind around it: Molly had done her best to look after him in the past three years, and he suddenly found himself wondering if it had been out of goodwill or out of guilt.

 

“I know what you’re thinking,” Molly said, her voice shaking slightly as she spoke. “You think I was your friend because I felt bad; because he asked me to look after you. You’re partially right, at least. He asked me to keep an eye on you. But you’re a good man and you’re my friend, and I worry about you anyway.”

 

“Everyone’s so very concerned,” John muttered, shaking his head. “Everyone is so busy worrying about protecting me and not hurting my feelings that no one can be bothered to tell me the truth.”

 

“I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be,” Molly told him. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through, especially now. You’ve only just lost your wife, and now this? It isn’t fair.”

 

John stared at her, dumbfounded. “That’s the best explanation you’ve got? Life isn’t fair? Thanks for the fortune cookie wisdom, Molly – maybe you should just stick to what your best at, which is apparently smiling and lying.”

 

“Right, then,” Molly said. She looked away from John and began gathering her things. “I’ll just leave you to it.”

 

“You’re what, surprised that I’m angry?” John asked.

 

“No,” Molly said. “I’ve spent the past three years asking myself if each day was going to be the day that he showed back up. To be honest I was convinced by now that he wasn’t coming back at all and I thought, alright, something’s happened, and he’s really dead. But I knew that if and when he turned up that you’d be angry. With me, with him, with everyone. And I’m not saying you’re not right to be. But did you ever stop to think about Mary in all this?”

 

“She’s got nothing to do with this.” John stared at Molly for a moment longer and hoped he didn’t flinch outwardly at the mention of his wife’s name. He grabbed the sponge back up out of the bucket, and began scrubbing at the wall. His entire body was hot with anger, and he focused instead on the way the blood smeared under the sponge instead of on Molly.

 

“Not exactly, no,” Molly said. “But…if you’d known. About Sherlock, I mean. Odds are you wouldn’t have met her in the first place, would you? Never would have asked her out, never would have married her.”

 

“Does this have some kind of a point?” John snapped, not turning around to face Molly.

 

“I’m only saying that I know that you’re angry, and confused and I get all that,” Molly told him, her voice shaking a little as she spoke. “But Mary, she was good for you. She loved you. And because of you, a good woman didn’t die alone. And that should count for something.”

 

John stopped scrubbing again and there were at once a thousand things he wanted to say. Some of them were angry. Some of them were things he should have said to Mary somewhere along the way but hadn’t. Some of them were things he’d sworn he would never say to anyone. He leaned more heavily against the wall for support as Molly’s words hit him like a ton of bricks. Molly didn’t say anything else, and John stayed that way staring at the blood on the wall until he heard the sound of the door shutting quietly behind him. When he turned back, he saw that Molly had already gone.

 

He went into the study an hour later, having finally scrubbed the wall clean of Moran’s bloody message. His arms ached from the effort, but he paid them little mind. Moran had taken less time in this room, and the majority of the work involved scrubbing blood out of the carpet all over again. Some of the books on the shelf had been thrown about as well, and John picked them up and put them back onto the shelves against the wall.

 

The skull grinned at him from the mantle, and John stared back at it for a moment before making a silent decision. He found empty boxes in a nearby closet, and dropped several of them onto the floor of the study. He began grabbing books by the handfuls – books that belonged to Sherlock – and dropping them into the box.

 

At first, it was a calm motion, but he realized quickly that there was something satisfying about it and so before long, he was grabbing up as many as he could at a time and dumping them in chaotic heaps in the boxes until they were filled and the shelves were empty. He yanked the framed print of a skull down from its place on the wall and chucked it on top of one of the heaps of books.

 

He saved the skull itself for last, picking it up from the mantle and staring at it for a moment in quiet contemplation. He fought the urge to fling it against the wall and see if it would fracture with enough force, but something held him back from it. He dropped it instead on top of a heap of boxed up books, and left the boxes sitting in the floor, deciding he would figure out what to do with them later.

 

*                                                                        *                                                                        *

 

John was at work for less than two hours the next morning before he overheard a news report on a patient’s TV that stopped him dead in his tracks. He was checking the chart of an elderly woman who had recently undergone open-heart surgery when he heard a familiar name during a news report, and when he stopped and devoted his full attention to the television, he felt his heart drop.

 

According to the report, Doctor Hilary Parker had been found dead in her home by her housekeeper the previous evening, and, the report went on to say, the cause of death was pending a coroner’s inquest and further police investigation. The grim-looking woman standing in front of the police tape declared that a source within Scotland Yard suggested that the crime was incredibly violent in nature.

 

John had left the room, unable to listen to it any longer. He remembered the calm, collected expression on Sherlock’s face while sitting in the woman’s living room, and how casually he had talked about her life ending, and it was nearly enough to make him physically ill. He knew without question who had done it, and if Kitty Riley’s death had been any indication, he could only imagine what Sebastian Moran might have done to his former comrade to whom he had initially reached out for help.

 

The next few hours went by so slowly that they were agonizing. John took the opportunity of lunchtime to find his way down to the morgue, where Molly was rinsing off what was left of some blood on the autopsy table. She glanced at him with uncertainty, as though she couldn’t be entirely sure whether she should be happy to see him or not. John supposed he was still agitated with Molly, but there were more pressing – and disturbing – matters at hand.

 

“Hilary Parker,” John said simply.

 

“Pardon?”

 

“The murdered woman. Doctor Hilary Parker. She was murdered last night,” John said. “Tell me what happened. Show me the body. Something.”

 

“Are you alright?” Molly’s initially uncomfortable expression had transitioned to one of concern. John wondered if he looked as panicked and nervous as he currently felt. He did his best to remain calm and still, despite feeling a sensation akin to wanting very badly to crawl out of his own skin.

 

“I spoke with her a few days ago about something,” John told her. “She was an old acquaintance of the man who tried to kill me. And now she’s dead, and I don’t have a whole lot of time, so if you could just give me the details I’m looking for, I would really appreciate it.”

 

Molly’s eyes lingered on him for a moment longer, and she found the chart she was looking for with little effort. “Cause of death was blood loss. There were ligature marks as well, but those were from…tying her down.”

 

John felt sick all over again. “What did he do?”

 

“Toxicology will take time, but as closely as we can tell, he sedated her heavily and then he, um...he did this to her,” Molly said. She handed the folder over to John, who wasn’t entirely prepared for the police photographs inside. Kitty Riley had been upsetting: Hilary Parker was another matter entirely. John swallowed and tried not to react to the photos as he flipped through them, and he realized with growing horror as he went through the photos why even Molly – usually unflappable when it came to dealing with the dead – seemed uneasy.

 

Kitty Riley had died a slow, painful death. Hilary Parker, by comparison, likely hadn’t felt an ounce of pain as she died, and to John, that was the true horror of it. The police photographs added a bright, macabre spectacle to it all, and he was grateful that Molly had hesitated to show him the pieces of her body. Sebastian Moran had immobilized her with drugs, strapped her down to her own kitchen table, and then – while she lay there, helpless and unable to struggle, he had begun to dismember her, piece by piece, while she was alive and conscious. When John got to the picture of the mirror suspended above the kitchen table so that Doctor Parker could watch her own dismemberment, he closed the file, and thrust it back into Molly’s hands.

 

“Blood loss…she was alive for most of this,” John said, finally finding his voice again.

 

“He amputated all four of her limbs, cauterizing the wounds as he went,” Molly said. “He knew just enough to keep her alive the entire time, until he cut her throat.”

 

“God.”

 

“John, what’s happening?” Molly asked.

 

John shook his head. “The man who tried to kill me – the man who did this – he was James Moriarty’s closest associate. He knows by now that Sherlock is back in London. That’s why he came after me in the first place. We questioned this woman five days ago about him, and now she’s dead. But he already knew Sherlock was back. Why would he…who would do something like that?”

 

Molly didn’t have any answers, and John excused himself a few moments later. His head was newly pounding with the reality that not only had Moran gone back for Doctor Parker, but had killed her in the most inhumane and violent way he could come up with. Part of John wanted to be angry at himself and angry at Sherlock for simply walking away from her that night; the other part of him acknowledged that it was likely that Moran would have killed her eventually anyway, and that was what he chose to tell himself.

 

His phone went off in his pocket on the elevator ride back up to the emergency room, and he checked it almost without realizing it. It was a text from an unknown number that read simply:

 

_The trouble with any disguise is that no matter how hard you try, it’s always a self-portrait. –SH_

 

John read the message over again, and once more just to be sure, and then jammed his phone angrily back into the pocket of his coat as the elevator doors opened again.

 

Hours later, when his shift had ended and he had taken some time to calm down from the shock of the details of Hilary Parker’s murder, John sat alone in his office at Bart’s enjoying the silence. It had been a hectic, noisy day and he was exhausted, and yet the text from Sherlock stuck with him every bit as much as the blood soaked crime scene photos did, eating away at the corners of his mind until it consumed his thoughts entirely. He leaned forward in his chair and rested his head in his hands. The sun just setting over London outside, and the daytime bustle was now transitioning to a flurry of headlights and car horns as the city’s lights popped up, one by one, as they had for ages.

 

John pulled the phone out of his pocket and read the message over again. He fought back the urge to text Sherlock back and ask if he had heard about Doctor Parker’s murder, as he knew that it was probable that the other man already knew all the details he did and then some. He pondered texting Sherlock about Molly’s knowledge about his faked death, too, but again found himself unable to come up with the right words for the job.

 

He thought back to Sebastian Moran, the man seemingly behind it all – he had come to John in the guise of a grieving friend seeking vengeance for a dead friend. He had claimed while sitting in John’s living room that it had been his way of gaining John’s sympathy, and John sucked in a breath as he realized that wasn’t the case at all.

 

Sebastian Moran, John thought, had been telling him the truth. Or, at least, his own version of it. He had killed Jack Howard to get the ball rolling and for credibility’s sake – he had played the role of the grieving friend convincingly. Perfectly, even, and John realized that at the very least, there was a chance that in his own psychotic way, Moran was acting out of grief and vengeance.

 

He grabbed a notepad from his desk drawer and scribbled down all of the personal details about Sebastian Moran that he could recall, and all of the personal information he had given him as Robert McDowell as well. He was in his mid-to-late thirties. He was an Iraq war veteran discharged for psychiatric reasons. He had had mentioned PTSD and paranoia, and an occasional penchant for gambling. He was a hunter and a man who seemingly had a fixation on manners. And a man who was obsessed enough with getting to Sherlock Holmes that he would kill as frequently and as violently as he had to in order to draw the man out.

 

John read Sherlock’s text again, and stared back at the list of what he knew about Sebastian Moran. A man, he decided, could fake a name. He could easily produce a story about a murdered friend and perhaps even come close to tears about it. He could change the way he walked, and the way he talked, but the one thing that Sebastian Moran could not manufacture, John realized, had been that look in his eyes. The look of a soldier who had seen war, whether or not it had affected him, and so he knew that – if nothing else – was a bit of truth behind the disguise.

 

*                                                                        *                                                                        *

 

“John bloody Watson. Come in, come in.” Many years ago in Afghanistan, Colonel David Murray’s friendliness had set many a young recruit at ease and thrown just as many entirely off guard. John remembered basic training: the shouting, the running, the sudden and rude awakenings at god awful hours of the morning, and he hadn’t missed any of it one bit. Colonel Murray was, as far as John was concerned, a good man, a great soldier, and a brilliant leader.

 

He would, John remembered, share food and whatever else his wife sent in her care packages with everyone else in the unit. Not every moment in Afghanistan had been filled with conflict and gunfire, and Colonel Murray’s thoughts were that a taste of normalcy and a taste of home were sometimes as essential as a careful eye and a clean gun. It had been he who had given the children in the neighboring village a football. He would dispense snacks among the soldiers in his unit, whether they were his closest friends or the greenest of the new arrivals.

 

He was also the man who had effectively saved John’s life more years ago than John could count. John remembered each second that led up to and followed being shot – the moments before were fevered and quick and fleeting, as were any memories that came with being under heavy fire. The moments after were slow, achingly slow, as though etched into his mind in a way that the others were not.

 

Not long after he had silently asked to live, he could distantly recall Colonel Murray’s voice through the ringing in his ears and the pain. If John remembered correctly, the Colonel had sworn a blue streak and hoisted John up from the ground and half-carried him to safety. He was sure that all of it was filed away neatly somewhere, primly detailed and chronicled according to Army standards. That was, at the moment, what he was counting on.

 

It had been an impulse and a shot in the dark to contact his former commanding officer, but it was too much of a nagging feeling of curiosity (now mingled with guilt) about the increasingly messy debacle of Sebastian Moran for him to ignore. And so he had called the man and asked for a few moments of his time. True to form, even after years of not speaking, the Colonel had agreed without giving any hesitation.

 

They went into a large, spacious study in a comfortable, roomy flat near the outskirts of London. When John arrived at the home it was quite nearly dinnertime, and he even seated in the study with the Colonel, he could hear Mrs. Murray in the kitchen. He knew from photographs and hurried phone calls back in the dessert that the other man had three children, and occasionally, John would note the sound of running on the floor.

 

“That’s Sophie,” Murray pointed out when the running intensified on the second floor.

 

John stared at him. “It can’t be.”

 

“Six years old this past November,” Murray told him, shaking his head. “They say all those things about them growing up so fast and younger men roll their eyes. But I’m here to tell you, John, it’s bloody _true_. One day she’s trying to break out of her crib, the next, she’s chasing the dog down the hallway so that he can attend her tea party.”

 

“That makes your oldest…what, a teenager?” John asked. He had been nervous walking into the other man’s house. He didn’t interact with anyone from his time in Afghanistan and had made a point not to, and he wasn’t sure what to expect. Yet now, he felt strangely at ease in the man’s company, and remembered very well why he had been fond of his superior in the first place.

 

“Kelly,” Murray said. “She’s got this boyfriend. He’s in a band. I hate him, but I can’t say it outright, because that means she’ll just run right to him and marry him. That’s what Katie did when her father declared he hated me, after all.”

 

“God, has it really been that long?” John muttered. The truth was that he could fully believe that Afghanistan had been so long ago. He had felt most of the time pass by slowly, sometimes painfully, despite periods where the time hardly mattered. Colonel Murray was grayer than John remembered, and it struck him again how often he thought that of the people around him.

 

Murray took a cigarette from its pack, offered John one, and then tucked them back into his pocket when John declined. “I heard about your wife. Saw it in the paper – I’m sorry to hear that, John.”

 

“Thank you, sir,” John said, managing a smile as best he could.

 

“Please, you’re not in anymore,” Murray told him, blowing out a puff of smoke. “You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ especially not over something like that. Hell, I’ve been trying to quit smoking for six months now. Down to two a day. Thought about trying those patches out, but I don’t trust them.”

 

“I have it on good authority that they work,” John said.

 

“I’m sure you didn’t come all this way to talk about ways to stop smoking,” Murray said. “You said that it was something urgent and a bit sensitive on the phone, but wouldn’t say what it was.”

 

“Yes, um…this is going to sound strange,” John told him, trying to figure out how best to word his request. “But I need information about someone. He didn’t serve with us, or even in Afghanistan at all, I don’t think. I spoke with a member of his unit a few days ago and she’s, well…she’s been murdered.”

 

“Hilary Parker?”

 

“You’ve heard of her?” John asked, surprised.

 

“Not until this morning’s news, no.”

 

“I spoke with her a few days ago about the man in question. She made it sound as though he was honorably discharged due to psychiatric reasons – maybe she hinted that she didn’t agree with that, and that he was more dangerous than Army wanted to let on,” John said. “She all but spelled out that his superiors wanted to make sure he had career opportunities when he got back to London.”

 

“So they buried him in paperwork, you think,” Murray said, nodding and taking another long drag from his cigarette. “Tidied up the mess a bit and wrapped it in a neat little bow.”

 

“That’s the theory,” John told him. “Because from what I’ve seen, PTSD doesn’t even begin to cover it. His own doctor admitted that whatever was wrong with him was there before Iraq. But I’m on the outside now, and I know you don’t owe me any favors, but I need to see his personnel files. And you’re the only one I can trust with it.”

 

Murray settled back in his chair, and puffed on his cigarette again. “May I ask why you’re choosing to go down this road?”

 

“Because, at the very least, he’s a good shot,” John told him. “Better than me or you. And he has a friend of mine in his sights. Not all of us came back from the desert and settled down, it seems.”

 

“Know thy enemy,” Murray muttered with a nod. “What’s the fellow’s name?”

 

“Sebastian Moran,” John said. “He claimed to be out of Third Division, but there’s every chance he was lying about it, so I wouldn’t use that to point you in the right direction.”

 

“I’ll make a few calls,” Murray said. “If I push hard enough, I can get you what you need by lunchtime tomorrow.”

 

“Thank you,” John said. “You have no idea how much I appreciate this.”

 

“So does this mean you’re back to it, then?” Murray asked him, stamping out what was left of his cigarette in an ashtray.

 

“Back to what, exactly?” John asked.

 

“Back to solving cases and fighting crime,” Murray said, unable to suppress a smile. “Not going to lie to you, I could barely believe it when I saw your blog in the first place. I thought, ‘Surely this isn’t _our_ John Watson. But I’ll be damned if it wasn’t you. Me and Katie, we read every single one of those cases. Brilliant work, too. We hated to see them stop, to be honest.”

 

“Um, thanks,” John said. “And I’m not…back to it, really. I’m just looking into something for a friend of mine. It’s been years since all that and I’m not really looking to get back into it. I wasn’t even the one solving the crimes. I was just a blogger.”

 

“Oh yeah. The infamous Sherlock Holmes,” Murray said, rolling his eyes. “Boy, the press had a field day with that one, didn’t they? Heaven forbid a regular old fellow off the street be better at solving crimes than all of Scotland Yard.”

 

“Depending on who you ask, that’s up for debate,” John said. For a fleeting moment he had believed that Murray was about to go down a road that, in spite of everything, was likely to send John into a fit of anger, and either way, John knew that he would have had no choice but to fight it. He unclenched his fist and relaxed a bit.

 

“Come on,” Murray said. “I know you at least well enough to know that you’re not stupid, and you’re not a liar. If you wrote a damn blog about it, no matter how crazy some of it seemed, then I’ll take it as gospel.”

 

“And it’s appreciated. But sadly most of London didn’t see it that way,” John said.

 

“Well, most people are idiots,” Murray told him. “It’s not a very nice thing to say, but it’s true, isn’t it? Thousands of people in this city, going about their business without a clue what’s really happening in the world around them. They’re all happy to go to work, come home, watch telly, and pretend that whatever’s on the news couldn’t possibly affect them. Those of us who have been over there know better. Those of us who have seen some of the things that you’ve seen know better. Sometimes, for the common man, it’s easier to believe the lie than to take a leap of faith.”

 

John left Colonel Murray’s house not too long later, despite his wife’s insistences that he stay for dinner. Despite his success in asking a favor of the Colonel, he felt somehow rattled by the conversation, as though simply seeing the man again had taken him back in time to places that were reserved strictly for nightmares and the parts of his thoughts he always tried to ignore or tuck away.

 

As promised, a stern-faced man in uniform arrived at John’s office at Bart’s the next day around lunchtime, and John felt a grim sort of satisfaction when he realized that Murray had come through for him. The soldier in question nodded in silent greeting as he handed over a large manila envelope and then left as quickly as he had appeared, and John was grateful to be left alone for the time being. Between the newly delivered paperwork and his nightmares the previous night, he was hardly in the mood for company.

 

He couldn’t remember the specifics of the dream anymore. He had been back in the desert, only he wasn’t alone this time: Sherlock, of all people, had been there, and he remembered finding it odd. There had been blood and a sensation of falling but beyond that he couldn’t remember much, and he had a feeling that he should be grateful.

 

He closed the door to his office and settled back into his chair, and opened the envelope that Murray had sent over. In a thick file, complete with medical records and psychiatric evaluations, was Sebastian Moran’s past, laid out for John. He couldn’t suppress a smile of triumph as he skimmed over the documents. He came to rest at least on an old life insurance claim that had been filed more than a decade ago, and his eyes went wide as he thought of Sherlock’s text message again. If disguises were self-portraits, John realized, then perhaps one of the truths that Sebastian Moran had inadvertently told him had been about his mother.


	9. Chapter 9

It was about a half hour cab ride from Bart’s to the care home listed as the address for Moran’s next-of-kin. John spent the entire ride tapping nervous fingers against the arm of the door. This was madness. This was not his problem. This was walking right into the middle of something he didn’t entirely understand and probably didn’t want to. No matter how many times he repeated those facts to himself, he had spent the rest of his workday glancing at the clock as though begging time to move faster.

Now London was cramped and traffic was a disaster, and John wondered several times as he checked his watch whether it would be quicker to get out and walk. When at last he arrived, he paid his cabbie and waited a moment before going inside.

 

“Can I help you?” A cheery looking young woman in hospital scrubs smiled at him from behind a small nurse’s station near the front entrance.

 

 _Never flash a badge for more than a few seconds – enough time for them to see that it’s real, but not enough time for anyone to realize that it’s not actually you._ He could hear Sherlock’s voice in his head.

 

 _And what if someone’s paying attention and notices that I’m not actually Lestrade or whoever?_ John had asked.

 

Sherlock had just rolled his eyes. _That’s the trouble, John. People_ don’t _pay attention._

 

That had been ages ago, not long after John moved in at Baker Street. Before the pool, before Moriarty, before John had developed any real understanding beyond shock and awe of who Sherlock Holmes was. He’d asked him about the badges after a case one night – each time Sherlock flashed one of Lestrade’s badges to gain access to something, John wondered if it would be the time someone realized that something wasn’t quite right. John realized eventually that Sherlock was telling the truth: flash a badge, people tended to panic, and doors opened.

 

“Yes, hi,” he said, flashing the badge. “Detective Inspector Gregson, Scotland Yard. I’m actually looking for one of your patients.”

 

“I-I’m sorry, sir, but-…”

 

“Ma’am, I really don’t have time for this,” he said. Stern, but not overly forceful. “I’m in the middle of a homicide investigation and one of your patients may have information that helps lead to an arrest. We can do this the easy way – you point me in the direction of someone who _can_ help me – or I can go all the way back to office, file unnecessary paperwork, and then have a chat with your superiors about obstruction of a police investigation. It’s really up to you.”

 

The cheery smile faded around the word ‘superiors,’ and she nodded and typed in her computer password. “Patient’s name?”

 

“Charlotte Moran,” he said simply, tucking the badge back into his pocket.

 

She typed it in, waited. “Room 6C. I’ll notify her care provider that you’re on your way.”

 

A quick elevator ride and a nervous breath or two later, and John was out onto a new floor of the building. Downstairs had been busy – patients sitting together in a common’s area doing some kind of arts and crafts activity. Plenty of staff and patients outside on the grounds getting some air or enjoying the gardens. This floor was quieter, but equally homey, and he wondered silently if a room here didn’t cost more than several months of his pay.

 

He came at last to 6C and he could hear a woman’s voice inside. The door was open, but he could make out Charlotte Moran’s nameplate on the door. Affixed directly next to the door to the room was a small display case with a tiny lock in one of its corners. In it were photographs – one of a man, a woman, and a young blonde boy on a beach. Another of a young couple getting married. Another of a very young Sebastian Moran in uniform. Just out of basic training from what John could tell.

 

He felt his heart sink a little as he let realization sink in. He’d seen this sort of thing before, back during his residency ages ago. And he wondered suddenly exactly how much information, if any, he would be able to get from a woman with Alzheimer’s. He pushed the thought from his mind and knocked on the open door.

 

“Detective Inspector Gregson?” A woman in her thirties came to greet him. “I’m Doctor Barnes. I was told you needed to have a word with our Charlotte. Something about an investigation?”

 

“No need to be alarmed,” he said, hoping he sounded convincing. “Just a few questions. She’s not in any danger. I just need to talk to her about her son.”

 

Doctor Barnes nodded, her voice softer now. “I have to warn you, Detective Inspector, she has good days, and she has bad days – sometimes it clicks into place. Other days, she can’t find her way back to her own room at all.”

 

“And what kind of day is today, do you think?” John asked.

 

“She’s been active,” Barnes told him with a small smile. “She went out to the gardens this morning. Picked some roses, even. She’s had a few bad days recently, but today she’s been very aware. It was her birthday last week – she turned fifty-five.”

 

“Fifty-five is a bit young for Alzheimer’s,” John commented.

 

“Early onset. She was diagnosed five years ago,” Barnes told him. “Before that, she was a happy, healthy woman. If you don’t mind my asking, what’s this about? Has something happened to Mister Moran?”

 

“I can’t really discuss an ongoing investigation,” he told her.

 

He followed Doctor Barnes into the small living area of the room. A thin, frail looking woman with pale blonde hair was seated in front of the television, absently picking at the seam of a quilt spread over her lap. Along the walls, there were framed photographs, some of distant relatives, some of an obviously younger version of the woman in the chair. John’s eyes fell to a picture of a boy of no more than twelve with that same blonde hair, kneeling in front of a gazelle alongside a taller man with brown hair. The man had a hand clamped on the boy’s shoulder, and he was absolutely beaming. The boy’s grin was smaller, more contained, but the pride was evident in his eyes.

 

“Charlotte, this is Detective Inspector Gregson. He has a few questions for you about Sebastian.” Barnes spoke clearly and loudly, and waited for the woman to acknowledge her.

 

Eventually, her eyes rolled upward, and she looked at John. “Hm?”

 

“Sebastian. Your son,” she said. She glanced to John. She reached for a framed picture sitting near the TV of a much younger Moran with his mother. She handed it over to the woman, and she clasped it with bony fingers for a long while.

 

“Has something happened to him?” she asked finally, her voice thick with a Dublin accent.

 

John cleared his throat, and glanced at Barnes. “No, ma’am. We actually might think he might be in a bit of trouble.”

 

Charlotte laughed softly. “Sebastian’s a good boy. Always has been. So polite, and so smart.”

 

“I’m sure that’s true, Mrs. Moran,” John said. “But if he were in trouble…is there somewhere you can think of that he might go? Somewhere he’d feel safe, that maybe not a lot of people know about?”

 

Charlotte looked to Doctor Barnes. “Could you get my album?”

 

“Of course.” Doctor Barnes went to the nightstand by the bed, and picked up a photo album there. She handed it over to Charlotte, who passed the framed photo off to the doctor in turn.

 

John watched the old woman open the photo album. “My only boy. Danny and I were young. Money was tight – we had this tiny flat in Dublin. Sebastian was such a fussy baby. He’d cry at all hours. Some nights, so would I.”

 

She handed the album over to John, pointing at a picture of a blonde toddler being bathed in a kitchen sink.

 

“He was so smart,” Charlotte told him. “We worked all the hours we could to move to England and put him in the best schools. He was a teacher’s dream, they said.”

 

“Mrs. Moran…when is the last time you saw your son?” John asked.

 

“It was my birthday last week.” She gave him a beaming smile. “He spent the whole day with me. Brought me flowers.”

 

“And how did he seem then?” John asked. He was willing to bet it had been before he’d attacked him, else it was likely that someone would remember Sebastian Moran running around a nursing home with a fresh wound to his face.

 

“Here he is in uniform,” she said, pointing to another photo in the album. “Daniel died when Sebastian was seventeen. He wanted to be like his father, and so he enlisted. I’ll never forget how he smiled when he had that uniform on.”

 

“When he was here, was there anything strange about him? Anything at all?” John asked.

 

“Not that I can recall,” Doctor Barnes said.

 

“How well do you know him?” John asked.

 

“I know that he’s a very busy man, but that he works hard to make sure that his mother is taken care of,” Doctor Barnes said. “He’s here as often as his job allows.”

 

John cleared his throat. “Any idea what line of work he’s in?”

 

“Something in the government,” Doctor Barnes said. “The sort of thing that he’s not really allowed to discuss, from what I understand.”

 

John fought back the urge to laugh. “Right.”

 

“He’s made several very generous donations to our program,” Doctor Barnes said. “He’s well-liked among the patients and staff here.”

 

“Mrs. Moran, are you sure that you don’t know of anywhere he might be? Some place he’d consider safe if he were in danger?” John asked, trying to get to the point of his visit. He flipped through the photo album in vain. Any kind of lead was better than what he currently had, which was almost nothing.

 

“He told me when he went off to war, he said, ‘Mum, don’t you worry. I’ll be back before you know it.’ And he was. He came back to me,” she said, that hapless smile still stretched across her face.

 

John froze as he came to rest on a photo in the album that made his stomach drop. A photo of Sebastian Moran at perhaps twelve years old, wearing a school uniform and posing with two other boys. John swallowed and stared at the photo. He knew those eyes. That damned smile. He couldn’t forget them if he tried.

 

“Mrs. Moran…do you know these boys?” John asked, holding the album out to her and pointing.

She looked, studying the photograph closely. “Of course. That’s Sebastian there, in the middle. That one…he was trouble. His name was Carl, I think. I never liked him much. And that one’s James. Such a sweet boy, that one. He and Sebastian were inseparable.”

 

John took a deep breath. “And do you remember James’s last name?”

 

“Moriarty,” Charlotte said with a nod. “Another Dublin boy at school. He was so soft-spoken. And that smile would light up a room. Sometimes Sebastian would come home upset because the other boys picked on him for not having money. I worried – but then he met James, and he was so happy to have a friend.”

 

“I’m sorry…James Moriarty?” Doctor Barnes stared at John.

 

“He used to come see me, you know,” Charlotte told John with a smile. “When Sebastian was off at war. He’d come for tea. Said I was like a mum to him. I can’t remember the last time I saw him…”

 

John sat back in the chair he had taken alongside the old woman, taking in the new information with a mixture of quiet rage and confusion. His head was aching terribly, and it occurred to him just how thin he was stretching himself. And yet there was something familiar here beyond the initial shock of what he had just learned.

 

He remembered something. Something from years ago, from a single conversation in a lab at Bart’s, a relatively minor detail that had, for the most part, been tucked away among much more important things. But still, there it was. Standing in a lab with Sherlock, analyzing a pair of sneakers.

 

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Moran, you said that this boy was named Carl?” John asked her, hoping his voice was still as firm and confident as when he had begun. Barnes gave him a slightly questioning look, but he ignored her.

 

“He was trouble, that one,” Charlotte said, shaking her head. “Always starting fights and picking on the smaller boys. Sebastian and James, they were his friends at first, and then they had a falling out of some kind. But they were both so devastated after the accident.”

 

Of course John knew what ‘the accident’ was, and what it _really_ was, but he still asked, “Accident?”

 

Charlotte’s happy smile faded, and she sighed. “No one knows exactly what happened, but he drowned during a trip here in London. I felt so sorry for his parents. Sebastian was devastated.”

 

He stared at the picture for a moment longer, at the bright smile on a very young Jim Moriarty’s face. He had an arm draped around Sebastian Moran’s shoulders, as did Carl Powers. A fuzzy picture of the boy’s death was swimming even more into focus, and the revelation was even more disturbing than before. He couldn’t help but note how unassuming everyone in the photograph seemed – Carl laughing, Jim with a wide grin, and Sebastian with a smile that never quite seemed genuine. John wondered if Sebastian’s tears were any more convincing than his attempts at smiling.

 

He spent a few more minutes going over old photographs with Charlotte Moran, asking in vain about her son’s potential whereabouts, but to no avail. He continued to press for information until Doctor Barnes had suggested that they take a break, and he had to agree. The woman was growing increasingly listless and agitated as the minutes ticked by, and John could tell that it wouldn’t be long before she gave up on communicating with him entirely.

 

And so, with that in mind, he had excused himself and told the somewhat confused doctor and the small woman still seated in her armchair that he would be in touch. John dialed Sherlock’s number as he stepped outside of the care home. He didn’t know if what he had found out would do any good, he thought as he crossed over a grassy area where several patients were out getting some fresh air, but it was something, at least.

 

“Having fun?” John stopped dead in his tracks, and tucked his phone back into his pocket without hanging up first.

 

He knew the voice before he ever turned around. Sebastian Moran stood under a large elm tree on the grounds of the nursing home. He had a plaster over his cheek from their scuffle the previous week, but aside from that, he seemed perfectly ordinary standing there. No one on the street would have given him a second thought, let alone believed him capable of doing the things John knew that he had done.

 

“Starting to,” John said, turning to face him. “You’re not looking so good, Mister Moran. You should really be more careful.”

 

“Think that’s funny, do you?” the other man asked, taking a step closer. John didn’t back away, nor did he flinch at all.

 

“Just a bit, yeah.” John knew he was provoking him. Knew that it was probably a stupid idea. But at the same time, he couldn’t think of a better place to try to draw the monster out than in a public place. He hadn’t gotten by all these years by making himself terribly visible, and it was unlikely that he would change that anytime soon. Not until he got what he wanted.

 

Moran was only a few feet from him now. Close enough to talk more softly, but not close enough to take a swing. That was close enough, John silently decided.

 

“I’m glad,” Moran told him. “Because you just opened a very dangerous door. One I hadn’t intended to use at all, but since you’re so eager to play the game, I hardly see the harm.”

 

“Meaning?”

 

Moran stared at him for a moment, and then pulled his mobile phone from his pocket. After a moment of scrolling, he stopped. Managed a small smile through his injury. “Harriet Watson of Kenton Street. Bloomsbury. Nice neighborhood,” Moran told him. “I had no intention of involving that poor woman at all. But since you decided to take a peek at my family, well, turnabout is fair play.”

 

“Fair play. Right. Is that what you call all this?” John asked. “Slicing up innocent bystanders because you can’t get what you want?”

 

“Well that’s hardly my fault, is it,” Moran asked. “If Sherlock doesn’t want to come out and play, I have to get my kicks somewhere in the meantime. He’s very stubborn, that one. I can see why you like him.”

 

“Just spent half an hour listening to your mum go on about what a good boy you were,” John snapped. “If only I’d thought to bring along photos to show her what her son was really capable of.”

 

“And she – or anyone else – would believe a word of it, of course,” Moran said. “We both know how easy it is to convince the world of a lie.”

 

“But that was the great James Moriarty. He covered his tracks well enough. You didn’t,” John said, shaking his head. “I don’t think a glorified mama’s boy with a gun has quite the same pull as he did.”

 

John saw the anger in Moran’s eyes at the words. There was that predatory look, just barely concealed in his demeanor. “Tell me, John. Do you think that losing your sister will hurt more or less than losing your wife? Which is worse – knowing that you were completely powerless to stop a death, or knowing that you caused one?”

 

John still didn’t back down. “What’s wrong, Sebastian? Did I strike a nerve?”

 

“Women don’t put up nearly as much fight as men do,” Sebastian said. “I can at least hope she’s cute. If you’re any indication, I think I’m in for a real treat. You know I’ve had you in sights twice already and you’re still standing. But only because you were a pawn.”

 

“Yes, I get it. I’m useless if not for Sherlock,” John said, rolling his eyes. “But if I’m useless without Sherlock, then what does that make you, exactly, without Jim Moriarty?”

 

Sebastian laughed, and shook his head. “And the adorable thing about you is that you think that will work with me. I’ve been playing this little game for decades. You’re still a rookie, sweetness. Trying to provoke me isn’t going to work.”

 

“I’m getting that.”

 

“It’s funny,” Sebastian said, giving John an almost curious look. “But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t take much to rattle you. Want to test my theory?”

 

“No, but considering that you still never manage to shut the hell up, I’m sure you’ll enlighten me anyway,” John shot back.

 

Sebastian chuckled at his words, and didn’t say anything for a moment. “As I said, twice in your life you’ve been in my sights. Surely it hasn’t escaped you that you’re the common denominator in getting Sherlock Holmes to react. I’d wager you’re the closest thing to caring about someone the man is capable of, and yet he left you all the same. Dying and leaving people behind – as I’m sure you know – is cruel enough. But letting someone _think_ you’re dead? That’s downright inhuman.”

 

“So that’s it, then?” John asked, refusing to so much as blink at the words, no matter how much they might have stuck with him. “Is this little chat over?”

 

Sebastian continued to eye him, clearly attempting to gauge his reaction. “I imagine so. Best to conserve energy for now. Torturing someone to death can take a lot out of a man. And I’ll bet dear Harriet has at least a bit of fight in her.”

 

“You really don’t want to take this route,” John said.

 

“I really think I do, Captain Watson,” Moran told him, the macabre grin on his face growing a bit. “I think you’re all talk without your little friend. You’ve seen what I’m capable of – I know you, John. I don’t think you’ve got it in you.”

 

John swallowed. “If you actually knew me, you’d know that’s a fucking mistake.”

 

“Hm. That’s good…very good.” Moran’s eyes were almost alight with excitement. “Just keep fanning that fire, John. Maybe you’ll see that we’re not so completely different after all.”

 

“Keep telling yourself that, mate,” John told him. “Are we done?”

 

“You tell me. Are you going to walk off of these grounds and never set foot on them again?”

 

John hesitated briefly, and then smiled. “Maybe we’re not so completely different, Sebastian. But I could never be what you are – if I thought it would do any good at all, I’d threaten your mother. But I can look at you and tell it wouldn’t make a difference to you in the end.”

 

“And that’s why you’re going to lose,” Moran said, leaning a bit closer. “Both of you. It’s only once you stop caring about anything else but the mission that you can truly fight a war. But best of luck.”

 

They stood there staring at each other for a moment longer. John refused to be the one to walk away – he was trembling on the inside with rage and fear and everything else that came with these situations, but he showed none of it. But he knew that if he turned his back to Sebastian Moran, even for a moment, there was no telling what he would do now that he was good and angry. If it hadn’t been a tense scenario, John might have laughed at the prospect of the two of them standing on the well-manicured grass of the care home on a lovely afternoon, one with a bandage on his face, the other bruised and exhausted, trading insults.

 

At last, Sebastian tucked his phone back into his pocket, gave John a solemn nod, and brushed past him. “Right, then. My regards to Sherlock. See you around, Captain Watson.”

 

John turned and watched him go. He waited until he saw the man get into a cab at the curb and pull off into the early evening traffic. He stood there for a moment collecting himself, waiting for the shaking sensation in his belly to lessen. He set off walking in the opposite direction on the sidewalk, cutting across to a busier street with crowds going into stores and the cinema.

 

He grabbed the phone from his pocket – the call was still connected.

 

“Keep walking and do not stop,” Sherlock said immediately when John put the phone back to his ear. “I assume you’re not armed.”

 

“Not just leaving a care home, no,” John said.

 

“Alright. Just tell me where you are. I’ll send someone,” Sherlock said. John noted what sounded remarkably like fear in the man’s voice, but he said nothing of it.

 

“He threatened my sister, Sherlock,” John told him.

 

“It’s taken care of. Right now, I need you to stay calm,” Sherlock said. “A car should arrive in the next ten minutes. I’m texting you the plate number. If the number doesn’t match, you do not get in. Do you understand?”

 

“Perfectly.”

 

Ten minutes of waiting and a black car arrived as expected, and John was relieved when the license plate number matched. He wasn’t especially in the mood for running or fighting for his life, as his encounter with Moran had proved more exhausting than he initially thought. When the car pulled away from the curb with him safely inside it, John settled back and tried to collect his thoughts.

 

But not matter how hard he tried, and he hated to admit it, he couldn’t shake Sebastian Moran’s words off entirely. The man’s almost predatory sort of intensity, combined with his absolute certainty about everything he said, was unnerving enough – but more unnerving still were his words about Sherlock. It was, John realized, what he had wanted to say to Sherlock since learning that he was alive, and he felt a pang of guilt when the thought occurred to him that life had, to some extent, been simpler when he believed that his friend was dead. Then, he thought back to Mary and how she had essentially wasted away, and realized that ‘simpler’ was by no means the correct word for what he was feeling.

 

John pushed the thought away as he stared out the window at the city around him. Clouds were beginning to cover what sunlight was left in the afternoon, and a low rumble of thunder threatened another rainstorm. Of course he was glad that Sherlock was alive. But at the same time, there was still the fact that the man had been alive for three years and hadn’t bothered to so much as text him, only to show back up and expect him to fall back into old habits without missing a bit. And, John realized, he had done exactly that, which only made his growing frustration that much worse.

 

He was stretched too thin. His wife had died only a few short months ago, and he had handily avoided thinking too much on it thus far. John couldn’t help but wonder what Mary would have said if she had seen the state of their flat. Or if she could see John out running from the police and arguing with a murderous sniper. She had always appreciated the madness of his stories, but they were just that: stories. Faint glimpses into a past that John had, at the time, attempted to close the book on altogether. Increasingly hazy memories of dozens of cases, of a man who most people believed was a fraud.

 

John had a thousand things he wanted to say to Sherlock. Some of them were angry and filled with obscenities. Some of them were carefully thought out explanations of exactly how difficult things had been following his ‘death.’ And some of them, John wasn’t really sure how to quantify at all just yet, and so he didn’t bother trying.

 

John recognized Mycroft’s home when they pulled up. Night had fallen over London, and weekend traffic and crowds were out and about the city in full force despite the threat of rain. It provided a bit of comfort to feel so lost in a crowd, John thought as he made it inside the home. A bored looking young man ushered John into the sitting room. Sherlock was standing near the far window, back toward the door. He didn’t turn around when John entered. Mycroft was seated in one of the overstuffed armchairs near the fireplace, looking even more grim than usual.

 

Mycroft looked up at him, sighing. “It’s as though you’d like to be a target.”

 

“Not really in the mood,” John said, shaking his head. “So what’s happening, then?”

 

“I believe the term that some would use is ‘total war,’” Mycroft said, taking a sip from the glass in his hand. “In which men like Sebastian Moran and James Moriarty are firm believers. If your target runs to ground, leave no ground left unturned. He started with you because he knew that it was the quickest way to draw Sherlock out. Now you’ve made a new enemy and you’re every bit as much a target as he is – you know too much.”

 

“I’m getting that,” John said, shaking his head. “And my sister?”

 

“Unhappily on her way to somewhere secure. As is your former landlady. And anyone else that Moran might attempt to harm in the quest to get to either of you,” Mycroft told him. “I don’t think I need to tell you that this could have been avoided.”

 

John felt white-hot anger at the words. “Three years late on that, don’t you think?”

 

“Yes, fine,” Sherlock muttered, speaking for the first time since John’s arrival, and John realized after a moment that he was on the phone. He turned, rolling his eyes. “That’s not really that high on my list of concerns right now. Just give me the address.” He waited another moment, nodded, and hung up.

 

“So,” John said, not hesitating. He was angry, and as far as he was concerned, he was completely justified. “Any more errands you’d like to send me on that could get me killed?”

 

“I need cash.” Sherlock didn’t acknowledge John at all. He instead turned to Mycroft, who was already busy pouring himself another drink. “And I’m really not asking.”

 

Mycroft took a swig from the glass, and grimaced. “Fine. If it’s not too much trouble, try not to get yourself or anyone else killed.”

 

John saw a flash of something angry in Sherlock’s eyes, but it only lasted for a moment before he swallowed it back down, and said calmly, “I hardly think this is the time for that particular discussion, Mycroft. Do what you do best – cover your ass. And everyone else’s.”

 

Mycroft silently pulled his wallet from the pocket of his jacket, and handed the stack of bills inside over to Sherlock. The other man tucked the money and his phone into his pocket, and went toward the door.

 

“Where are you going?” John asked.

 

“There’s something I need to take care of,” Sherlock said without looking back. “It would be easier with two, I suppose.”

 

There was a split second in which John balled up a fist and considered punching him all over again. Or, at the very least, telling him to piss off and letting him go on his way. It was barely nightfall, and he was already fed up. But at the same time, he wondered where exactly he was supposed to go or what he should do. Sebastian Moran knew where he lived. He couldn’t very well sit by and let Sherlock go off alone, which is exactly what part of him was saying to do. He swallowed down his anger all over again.

 

“Right. Fine.” It was all he said. He followed Sherlock outside, and the two waited for a cab in silence for a few moments. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where we’re going?”

 

A cab finally pulled to the curb, and Sherlock opened the door and climbed inside, John following again behind him. “It’s a shot in the dark, but it’s better than nothing. Moran threatened your sister, and my brother philosophies of war notwithstanding, is right about him. He knows that I’m alive, and he knows what strings to pull to get my attention. With you and everyone else safe, he’ll start branching out. He’ll likely be paying a visit to any co-conspirators of mine he can get his hands on.”

 

“Molly.” Of course, John realized. She had known the entire time that Sherlock was alive, and had helped him pull the entire trick off in the first place.

  


Sherlock gave the cabbie an address, and then turned back to John. “Very good, John. Of course, I could be wrong, but it’s worth a shot. He likely won’t take care of it himself – I imagine he’s on his way to pay your sister a visit. He’s going to be unhappy when he doesn’t find her, which is what I’m counting on.”

 

“Why is that, exactly?” John asked. He had seen the beginnings of anger in the man less than an hour ago, and he couldn’t help but wonder if provoking him further was a mistake. The adrenaline of their earlier confrontation was gone and now replaced with worry.

 

“The angrier he is, the less rational he’ll be,” Sherlock told him. “He’s operating without a master to guide him, and has been for a while. He’s ruthless in his own respect, and by far the most dangerous man in London. But there’s a reason he was part of a partnership, and he’ll get desperate.”

 

John considered this in silence for a few seconds, and shrugged. “Surely he knows where you’ll be and what you’re doing. Why doesn’t he just come right out and shoot you?”

 

Sherlock sighed, and tapped his fingers absently on the arm of the cab door. “Because that’s not what he wants. In his mind, a quick death would be too kind. It’s not worth it if he doesn’t attempt to beat me all over again first.”

 

“Hm. Charming.” John didn’t really know how else to respond, and so, for the time being, they fell into silence all over again. He was still angry, and Sherlock seemed determined not to engage in a prolonged conversation. He seemed to be exceptionally good at that these days, even more so than before, and for now, John was content to let him get away with it. He stared out his own window at the increasingly rain-slicked city, and tried to collect his thoughts.


End file.
